‘It’s not my pain. There’s a responsibility in that’: Thea Gilmore on writing songs from anonymous confessional voicemails

‘This project has changed my whole thinking,” Thea Gilmore says of her new endeavour, The Echo Line. “What am I getting from it? All of humanity.” Disillusioned with the numbers-chasing music industry and wanting a break from her personal songwriting after releasing 22 folk-orientated albums since 1998, the 46-year-old is “putting people back at the centre of it. I’ve said enough about me.”

Community building has been key to the Oxford singer-songwriter’s work since debut Burning Dorothy, released when she was just 18, through to her 00s breakthrough albums Avalanche and Harpo’s Ghost all the way to her most recent studio album, 2023’s Thea Gilmore: a body of work that has won Gilmore admiration from Bruce Springsteen, Richard Thompson and collaborator Joan Baez.

But The Echo Line goes even further. Akin to a musical iteration of Nick Cave’s interactive fan advice column The Red Hand Files, Gilmore invites people to leave her an anonymous voicemail or written message via The Echo Line website about anything they want – hopes and dreams, fears and confessions, triumphs and tribulations – to which people have obliged with bravery and honesty in their thousands. Gilmore then writes a song inspired by one or more messages and uploads it to the website for a limited time only.

When it was launched in January, Gilmore was unsure if anyone would call, or even notice – she currently has no management, label or press team – but received 150 messages within two days. The fourth and latest song of the project He Walks Like War was listened to more than 10,000 times before it was taken down. Songs initially remained available for just one week – “music is so disposable and available all the time, I wanted to see what happened if I took it away again” – though demand for He Walks Like War meant Gilmore relented and kept the song up for several weeks.

Even as the community grows, Gilmore listens to and reads every message. “Listening has become increasingly undervalued in my lifetime. But it’s a powerful act. People more and more feel very alone. And I think what they’re getting from this is they know they’re actually being listened to, with no judgement.” The anonymity is key. “It’s really important to the integrity of the project that people know it’s genuinely an anonymous safe place.”

She admits she wasn’t quite prepared to receive such emotional messages. Certain themes recur: grief, loss and heartbreak; estrangement, especially from parents; messages about children, both pride and worries; the overwhelm of the modern world and distrust of elites. Many tell stories of overcoming adversity; one message detailed surviving an intruder attack at home (“like a Tarantino script”). But there are joyful ones too, including Gilmore’s personal favourite: a message about the interconnectivity of mushrooms as they grow in the ground. “In my bonkers songwriter brain, I’m like: that’s what this whole thing is about! We’re all connected, just like fungus.”

The trust placed in her, she says, is a delicate gift. “As a songwriter you feel emboldened in some respects because they obviously think I can do a good job with their story,” she says. “But it is really tough. Because it’s not my pain. You’re making sure you do other people’s lives justice. There’s a weight of responsibility in that.”

The Echo Line’s first three songs, beautiful examples of Gilmore’s spectral balladry, are incredibly moving. Blood Bike is an amalgamation of three messages: a blood bike worker delivering neonatal breast milk to hospitals, an overworked NHS nurse and a mother whose daughter was born prematurely. “They’re human stories that show we’re all connected, and this light went on – I was like: this is exactly what I wanted this to be.”

The second song, Silvie, tells the story of a relationship from 30 years ago tragically cut short by a road accident. The contributor was forbidden by their partner’s family to say a proper goodbye and the pain lingers. “That person’s message started ‘I don’t talk much about Silvie anymore’,” Gilmore says. “Those words just sat on top of your heart like a weight.”

A long-distance relationship conducted entirely online inspired The Lines (Greg), a non-traditional courtship that ended tragically with Greg’s death by suicide. Even though the messenger is now happily married, “they felt they couldn’t talk about it or explain to people that it had been so important to them. And I really wanted to honour that in a song, that some of the most transformative relationships can be outside the bounds of what society says you can do.”

The gnarlier He Walks Like War came after an influx of different types of messages from people across the political spectrum: disillusionment and anger at the billionaire class, tech bros and insidious algorithms dividing society. “You can see the same frustrations in completely different types of people. There are a lot of people out there who feel completely disenfranchised.”

With The Echo Line now open 24/7, Gilmore is currently working on the next song, to be released by the end of October. “A very happy song, one of the most beautiful stories framed in the most beautiful way.” She has big ambitions for The Echo Line, including gallery events and live shows. “I would love to see this grow. For me, this is a sort of project that when I die, I’ll be like: that’s what I was meant to do.”