Grace Petrie - Connectivity (2021)

- English folk singer Grace Petrie has been gradually rising in profile over the last decade - with songs of left-wing politics, queer female experience, and poppy singalong hooks. "Connectivity" is Petrie’s 8th album. The promo material describes it as her “most personal record to date”.

Of course, “the personal is political”, as the old 70’s feminist saying goes. That slogan developed as part of a practice of running what were called “consciousness raising” groups. The point was not that every personal experience or feeling is of wider political significance, but that political theory can illuminate our own experience and allow us to see the events of our lives not just as random or natural, but as things affected by the social constructs and power dynamics of our society.

Grace Petrie’s songs about being a queer woman are an example of this - they identify her personal experiences as partly the result of living in a heteronormative world.

On Connectivity, the best example of that is No Woman Wants To Be A Muse. Here she digs through a history of pop music to find tortured artists continuously using their romantic partners as material for heartbreak songs without ever trying to show the other side of the story. Our appetite for displays of extravagant emotion perpetuates these exploitative relationships, and Petrie identifies that she is not immune either, singing - “I dread the day I’ll have to answer for the songs of break-ups past”

It’s odd after hearing that incisive song to discover the rest of the album is peppered with heartbreak songs, plus Last Man On Earth which is about a queer woman pining for her straight friend who goes from one bad boyfriend to another. I have to admit that after the song about buying furniture for one amongst all the couples at IKEA, I was ready for something a bit less personal and a bit more political.

Which does come with closing track The Losing Side. Rarely does a song ostensibly about failing to change the world sound so triumphant, I’m sure it will become a crowd singalong at live shows. This is a personal song too - about dealing with our own limitations when faced with the world’s immense injustices. But it’s a political song - starting with a scene from the protest vigil for Sarah Everard, who in March this year was raped and murdered by police officer Wayne Couzens. Sarah Everard was one woman and Wayne Couzens one man, but their story is universal when it occurs in a world where men are socialised to think women are property they can take by force. The song also highlights how the personal is political in that our individual problems can only be changed if we acknowledge the responsibility we have to one another - “Safe at home, you watch it on TV / And never think that one day you could be the enemy / That you might be one day under attack / From all that should protect you, hoping someone has your back.”

So Grace Petrie’s most personal album is political after all. But the political is also personal - these structures and relationships we call society are formed by lots of individual actions. And that’s what The Losing Side highlights - on either an individual or societal level, it is through recognising our Connectivity that we have the power to change anything.