On Clever Rabbits, Ann Liu Cannon went down some truly mythological rabbit holes. Her album documents thousands of years of folk tales and religion, 25 years of living, and an era gone by. Cannon’s intense love songs, a few years after the fact, don’t always make sense to her present day self.
“I think at that point in time I experienced love in a very innocent, naive, wholesome way, but it meant that I was very prone to losing all sense of my orders and dissipating internally,” said Cannon. “I felt very messy and very lost in where I ended and where other people began.”
If Cannon wasn’t able to experience healthy love, she was at least able to experience biblical emotions over it. “Jealous God” is a hurricane of emotion and sound formed around the suspicion of a partner cheating. Cannon justifies her jealousy by matching it with that of God, who is many times over stated to be jealous in the Bible. “He made us in his own eyes,” she sings.
“When you’re in that jealous space, you play God in a way. It’s not an ideal thing to do to other people and yourself,” said Cannon. “I grew up around a lot of Sacred spaces. My schooling was through the Church of England and my father taught Sacred architecture. It didn’t mean that I was partaking – I’m not religious in a straightforward manner – but those environments mean a lot to me.”
The stories mean a lot to Cannon too. She said that she often compares events in her life to myths and proverbs. Speaking with Cannon, it’s clear that she sees just about everything on multiple levels. One line about smelling the fear of London was meant as both a reference to how the nose clears during moments of intense anxiety and how rabbits are always twitching their nose. When she identifies with characters in myth, she examines the implications that might have for her true desires. It’s a web of thought that’s nearly impossible to follow from an outsider’s perspective and yet genuinely fun to hear Cannon explain.
“These are some of the oldest texts we have and I like to root everything I’m doing in the past,” Cannon said. “I naturally want to draw on these myths and legends to help me tell my story.”
While Cannon’s father came from England, her mother came from China. That means another few thousand years worth of myth have followed Cannon to the UK and reside within her. The album title is based on the proverb that “clever rabbits need three burrows,” or it’s smart to have backup plans. In one of the more surreal moments in the interview, Cannon described historic stone carvings depicting three rabbits that appear both in China and England. They hold a special place for Cannon, who identifies with both cultures and the fact that she was born in the Year of the Rabbit.
“I got around in life a bit like a rabbit,” Cannon said at one point. “It’s very keen on burrowing away, very keen on the home, very sensitive to danger almost to the point where it gets very startled and at the very last minute they bolt. I think other people find the bolting quite jarring.”
Cannon described her own album as self-absorbed. She’s someone who often examines her own work critically, right down to her words during our conversation.
“To exist is to be angry,” she said at one point. “Did I say that? Oh my God I’m so dramatic” immediately followed.
To some extent, Cannon has a point. Others who feature on the album, most prominently her ex, don’t get a chance to share their perspective, she noted. While that’s not usually how albums work, the fact that Cannon is noticing limitations to her work shows she’s expanded her point of view since.
“There are things that are actually happening that you think are happening and there are things that are happening that you really have no idea,” Cannon said. “I was living in this myth land where all these things made sense to me. I feel safest in the written word.”
The surreal “Gobbleknoll,” a song about a myth about a hill that eats people, shows the way Cannon moves from myth to realization. In the story, a rabbit saves the day by ripping out the hill’s intestines. Her first reaction to the story was as a fan of interesting stories. (“This is fucking awesome,” she said.) Then she began identifying with the rabbit, as she tends to do. Before long, it was time to make a change.
“Perhaps if I want to kill my home then perhaps I’m not meant to be here and I’m not really a rabbit at all,” Cannon said. “Maybe you’re beyond the story you’re telling yourself. I can move beyond this story.”
On “Mên-an-Tol,” which references a historical site in the UK, Cannon wishes to “love like humans do.” It seems telling that she’s asking this of a rock formation instead of an elder or peer. Being lost in Cannon’s head is a truly interesting experience, even if only for an album.
There’s one song on the album about someone she loves that is beautiful and thoughtful beyond anything she wrote about a partner. “I held him like he held me once,” she sings of her dying father on “False Hope.”
“I was visualizing forward what that death was going to be. I wanted to write a song that was very joyful,” Cannon said. “The process of watching someone die gave me so much joy. He was there at my first moments in the world and I was there in his last breaths.”
Cannon described it as more of an honor than a typical feeling of happiness and pointed out that a lot of meaning in our lives comes from the fact that they are temporary.
“When you’re confronted with death in that way, every other emotion gets so much more precious,” said Cannon. “The terror and the pain in that situation meant that when I did feel joy, that joy was so much more appreciated.”
It’s here that Cannon’s grasp of large time scales and the patterns of human stories benefits her most. If myth helps Cannon to process loss and to outgrow an old self image, it may just be a more healthy lens through which to view the world than she realizes. It’s strange, but it works.
Above is the full episode as aired on WUSB’s Country Pocket, including both my interview with Ann Liu Cannon and the songs we discussed, starting with Jealous God, which kicks things off with a fire and brimstone intensity. The interview begins with the second video in the playlist. You can hear the show live every Monday at 4pm on WUSB 90.1 FM or check the blog to watch it as a YouTube playlist. Visit http://www.WUSB.fm and https://www.annliucannon.co.uk for more.
Country Pocket 