Virginia MacNaughton – releases new album ‘The Thread’

Virginia MacNaughton has released her third album The Thread.

The extraordinary new album is a passionate song suite which, through flowing vocal melodies, piano, and rich orchestration, charts the story of a destructive relationship and the salvation of new love. Reminiscent of Lorde, Carole King, and Aerial-era Kate Bush, it is an album of clarity and beauty, yet also cut through with wry wordplay and humour.

Work on The Thread began in October 2020, after the end of a brief encounter that had a profound impact. “I‘d had a fallow period musically and not had a relationship for years but was quite happy in my 40s, I was enjoying my work, gardening, planting, baking, I thought that was it” she says. “Then I reached 50, met a person online, and it was like someone reached into the dial in my brain and shifted it.”

After a couple of brief meetings with her ‘pursuer’ she was cruelly rejected and left devastated. In an attempt to make sense of it all, she sat at the piano, “and the songs were there”. Virginia called long-term collaborator William Jackson (The Cribs, Kaiser Chiefs, The Pigeon Detectives) and booked studio time. “I was writing so quickly, the songs were pouring out of me. I’d write one day and two days later be recording in the studio. That’s never happened to me before. The writing was a necessity. It became about surviving the ordeal.”

Even though The Thread is a painful document of Virginia’s experience, the process of creating it with Will was joyous. “The fact I was writing again after a such long break was the best gift of all”.

Each track details a different moment in Virginia’s journey of heartbreak and healing. Felix Burling’s sonorous flugelhorn of the title track, for instance, underlines the persuasiveness of desire, the sense of Virginia’s new lover “imbuing everything”, whilst in abrupt contrast ‘The Morning’ deals with the pain of being dispatched the morning after.

That feeling of unease is compounded by ‘The Kestrel’ – based on the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, Windhover – using birdsong samples to explore the metaphor of predator and prey.

‘The Taking’, meanwhile pieces together fragments of physical evidence (“You even took the free coffee/and I kept the card receipt”) to make sense of how she became the prey. ‘Spellbound’ and ‘Red Flag’ cover the dizzying obsessive back and forth meetings, her ex-lover’s fickle attention creating a disorientating kaleidoscope of desire. While with the song ‘Swipe’, Virginia maps out with dark humour the elaborate dance of online dating, and new words in her lexicon like ‘gaslighting’ and ‘breadcrumbing’.

The jazz feel of ‘Wolf Moon’, featuring expressive sax and the flourish of grand piano, marks a turning point, a loosening of the taut connection. And with the sardonic, tongue-in-cheek flow of ‘Glorious’, Virginia is beginning to heal.

‘New Moon Landing’ marks the arrival and joy of new real love, with the woman who becomes her wife. “She emerged with everything that had been missing.A connection which was whole, warm and grounded”, or as her future wife eloquently put it: “from the shit, grew roses”.

By 2021The Thread was nearly finished, but before the album was complete, life intervened. Virginia’s beloved father died, and then, after four and a half glorious years together, she lost her wife who died in the spring of 2025.

The Thread now resumes its journey and is out across all streaming platforms and vinyl today. “I had to complete the circle,” says Virginia. “The Bach prelude at the end of the album marks the memory of my dad – a piece he played all his life, Bach was his great love and he taught me to play the Prelude as a child”.

The photograph on the album cover is of Virginia aged two, with her Dad and sister. He passed down to her a love of melody and musical knowledge – a well of experience she drew from to create this album about moving from destructive obsession to enduring love. 

For a record shrouded by such immense heartache, by contrast it is sonically immensely uplifting as The Thread plays out a true reflection of the turbulent emotive experience of life. It encapsulates our uncontrollable urges, the carefree will to wholeheartedly follow joy, the resilience to withstand unfathomable trauma and the long, winding road to recovery and healing.

THE THREAD TRACK LISTING
Gravity
The Thread
The Morning
The Kestrel
The Taking
Spellbound
Swipe
Red Flag
Wolf Moon
Glorious
New Moon Landing
Prelude In C

The Thread, it is available to stream and download http://here

The vinyl is available to purchase exclusively from Bandcamp http://here