Track By Track: Jennifer Walton – Daughters

Her debut album ‘Daughters’ is a highly personal affair which has received praise and recognition from key publications and critics. We are delighted to have Jennifer break it down for us, telling us a little bit more about what went into the record and what it represents.

“To set the scene for the album it was created during, and in the aftermath of, the grief following my father’s passing. During this time, I was touring America as a session drummer (a dream I’d had since I was a child) while dealing with some of the most harrowing experiences of my life. The album seeks to explore the complexities of that period, both in the nature of grief itself and the overlap between dreams and reality. Each track aims to illuminate a different part of that process.

While many lyrics draw on hyper-specific moments from my own life, I believe that explaining them too objectively would detract from the magical vagueness that allows them to connect with other people’s experiences of grief. However, I’ll try to be as specific as I can.”

SOMETIMES

The album opens with “Sometimes”, a maximalist song exploring the confusion of how we relate to history, both personally and as nations. While in America, I became fascinated by how the history of such a young nation was still a living part of people’s psyche, yet simultaneously detached by constant newness and redevelopment. I wanted to capture a kind of “Cosmic Americana,” inspired by Edward Hopper, especially Office in a Small City and Morning Sun.

Production-wise, it was a fun exercise in seeing how far I could push Ableton to feel acoustic and analog, constantly trying to break free from the flat, tempo-locked grid. I also borrowed (stole) my partner’s saxophone and began learning it for this song, forcing any sound I could make through autotune and layers of processing, which ended up becoming one of the album’s trademarks.

BORN AGAIN BACKWARDS

The album moves on to “Born Again Backwards,” bringing a new angle to the maximalism of Sometimes. I was obsessed with the arrangements of Hakushi Hasegawa and wanted to see what I could create if I didn’t rely on my usual production safety nets such as reverb or delay. My goal was to make something that felt distinctly unlike myself: ultra sharp, angular, and cutting.

The lyrics are the most abstract on the album but point in several directions; toward overconsumption, abandoned shopping malls, and corporate logos all folding in on each other. The most obvious visual reference for the track is something like a Shintaro Kago artwork.

SHELLY

“Shelly” uses a personal story as a starting point for wider themes of Americana.

As a child, we would often drive between Sunderland and Leeds. One stretch of road was notorious for deer running out in front of vehicles. On one of these journeys, we collided with a deer while I was in the front seat as a small child. The images and intensity of that moment have always stayed with me. When thinking about Americana, it felt like a powerful starting point; these familiar symbols of roadkill and highways felt ripe for storytelling.

I wanted to explore an alternative history, imagining what could have happened if that experience had destabilized someone further.
The track features samples from Vietnam War radio and other vintage broadcasts. I loved the strange, timeless quality they lent the song, making it feel evocative of something much older and stranger.

LAMBS

“Lambs” was the last and quickest track to come together. There was a gap in the sequencing of the album, and I knew I needed another more straightforward, guitar-led song to fill it. The verses use biblical language as a framework that gradually collapses, reflecting on my own childhood. The chorus always had something of the feel of The Wizard of Oz or a biblical tragedy, perhaps reflecting the destabilising effect of grief.

When we played it live as a band, we jokingly referred to it as “Evil Arcade Fire,” and there are definitely moments that feel reminiscent of that era, in ways I was initially unsure about. All the strings here are recordings of me bowing my guitar, which adds a haunting atmosphere to the track.

SAINTS

“Saints” is the oldest track on the album but one of the last to be finished. It existed for a long time as an instrumental, originally written in my dad’s old apartment. The lyrics chronicle a day when I attended a research trial with my dad during his battle with cancer. It was one of the hardest days of my life, but the way that day imprinted itself onto familiar places like London Bridge and Brockly Station, and the banality of it all, was what I wanted to capture in Saints.

For me, Saints represents the haunting of those memories in the places I still visit, and even a kind of premonition of what was to come. Looking back, the fact that it was written during that time makes it feel like a haunting in itself.

MISS AMERICA

“Miss America” is the centerpiece of the album, both in sequencing and in spirit. Like Saints, it existed for a long time as a tiny loop (its project file was even named “Tiny Loop”) before becoming the track it is now. The song details the experiences and emotions of touring America during the summer of 2018, which was both a lifelong dream fulfilled and one of the hardest times I’d faced. Our van was broken into, and my laptop and medication were stolen, forcing me to navigate the American healthcare system. On the last day of that run I first learned of my dad’s diagnosis.
The track explores the fusion of dreams and reality while also drawing on the influence of songwriters such as Julia Holter and Lana Del Rey.

DAUGHTERS

“Daughters” is set vaguely in the aftermath of grief. It contains cut and stitched pieces of my diary alongside remembered conversations. This approach also shaped the production, which took weeks to build from scraps of phone recordings and studio ephemera. In many ways, I wanted it to feel like a house of cards both musically and lyrically: fragments stacked on top of each other, only briefly hinting at what they represent, like the shadow of something larger.

The track gains confidence as it progresses before leading into a final section that evokes something like a warped Tears for Fears.

IT EATS ITSELF

“It Eats Itself” was the first draft written for the album, and it was the moment I realised what the project could become. It came together so quickly that it felt as though it was being exorcised from me. The track depicts a particularly rocky summer following my dad’s passing, when SSRIs had stripped me of impulse control. In that haze, I lost my sense of self and began to self-destruct, though in a way that felt blindly manic and euphoric. I wanted to pull the listener down under the weight of the track, crushing my own vocals beneath layers of instrumentation.

Even now, this song still nearly bricks my laptop when I open it. The latter sections were written while trying to hear between constant audio dropouts from the sheer number of channels.

THE ONLY WAY OUT IS THROUGH

For the final track, I wanted to create a meditation or mantra that represented how I began to move through the grief explored earlier in the album. In real life, the only way out truly was through. The love and care of my friends and family alone is what helped me reach the other side.
Midway through the song, a choir fades in and begins to support and eventually overwhelm my voice. By beautiful coincidence, many of the voices in that choir belong to the very people who helped me through that time.

When the song was performed live at the old church in Stoke Newington, I was joined by one of my best friends, Daniel S. Evans, on the church organ, while the entire crowd sang the repeating mantra. It felt like the most powerful catharsis I could have hoped for, and a real marker in time showing that the album had finally been released into the world.

Thank you so much for reading. I hope this has shed just enough light on the album while keeping some of its mystery alive. Lots of love.