How MR WA7T’s debut album ‘No Thread Leads Back to the Heart’ helped him process gay trauma
The artist is stepping out of the shadows and into the spotlight with his multifaceted first record.
By Will Stroude
Words: Will Stroude; Image: Courtesy of Satellite 414
As MR WA7T releases his debut album No Thread Leads Back to the Heart, the Northern Ireland-born, London-based artist has reflected on how the record helped him to process familial trauma around his sexuality.
MR WA7T – real name Ian Watt – dropped the captivating nine-track album on Wednesday (27 April), after previously trailing its release with singles ‘Home’ and ‘Sleeping Like a Star’.
Having spent years in the music industry producing and remixing for everyone from Beyonce, Missy Elliott and Texas to Lana Del Rey, it was a family crisis that inspired MR WA7T’s first solo record and a renewed desire to step into the spotlight as an independent artist in his own right.
No Thread Leads Back to the Heart first began to take shape when Watt returned to his native Northern Ireland to support his sister as she underwent stem cell treatment. Born and raised during the Troubles, Watt left his home country behind for the bright lights of London and Glasgow as he sought to express himself – and find acceptance – as a gay man.
MR WA7T
Amid the emotional turmoil of supporting his sister with her health issues back home, fragments of songs and music would pour out of Watt each night as he returned to his hotel room in “a haze of booze and pills”.
After returning to London, he realised that what he’d created was not only the basis for an album of his own, but a dissection of trauma that reached far deeper into his psyche, including his mother and siblings’ struggle to accept him as a gay man.
“All these things I thought I’d dealt with started coming to surface”, Watt says in a press release. “But it turned out I hadn’t come to terms with anything.”
He adds: “As much as the record is about my sister, it’s about my mother and having a bad childhood. All these things seem to run in parallel.”
As No Thread Leads Back to the Heart unfurls with a kaleidoscopic array of soundscapes, Watt delves into his past through tracks like ‘Home’, a reflective slice of folk-tronica which sees the singer grapple with his mother’s extreme reaction to him coming out.
“Me and my mum were really close and there was a lot of love there, but I just remember her asking me to tell her it wasn’t real.” says Watt.
“She was really angry and almost went to throw up. She just couldn’t deal with it at all.”
While tracks like ‘Home’ and ‘Only He Knows’ – a love song for his partner of two decades – are intensely personal meditations, instrumental album closer ‘These Are My People’ sees Watt embrace the power of community and chosen family in an explosion of sonic joy.
“I turned 50 and when I think of my generation of gay men, there’s a lot of my friends who aren’t around anymore,” Watt says of No Thread Leads Back to the Heart, which is being released for friends departed as well as friends present.
“Quite a few of my brothers and sisters still don’t like the fact that I’m gay”, he continues. “When I go home, I still get looks from people I went to school with and still get called a poof. If you didn’t get that acceptance and love as a kid, you create it later on in life.
“[‘These Are My People’] is for those people. It’s about our little community.”
MR WA7T’s ‘No Thread Leads Back to the Heart’ is available to stream below.