M&G At 5 - Passion Projects
At Moths and Giraffes, we’re celebrating five years since we published our first article in January 2020! The seeds of this website began with a concert journal in May 2011 and by 2016 I was beginning to enjoy many smaller gigs by independent artists in and around London. 2019 was significant as the indie artists I was seeing converged and I immersed myself in a scene I still enjoy to this day.
I’ve since interviewed members of that scene and it was one in particular that at The Hideaway jazz club in Streatham said, ‘You should start a website, you’re doing all the writing anyway!’
That was November 2019. I spent Christmas of that year figuring out how you actually construct a website and how it might look. By January 2020 I was approaching New York indie songwriter Kate Davis after her gig at The Islington, wondering if she would maybe answer some questions via email. This became Moths and Giraffes Article #1, published on a website that wouldn’t have a logo for six months or any dedicated social media for a year.
Since then, we’ve gone on to publish over 240 articles, most with exclusive interviews and all with in-depth reviews. We’ve spoken to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, reviewed gigs at Hyde Park and the London Palladium, chatted to legends and legends in the making. We’ve interviewed artists from four continents, helped put on fantastic charity livestreams, and made some amazing friends along the way.
In this new series for 2025, we’ll look back at some of the music we’ve written about over the last five years and the brilliant artists we’ve gotten to talk to. We already told you our Top Ten Most Viewed articles back in May, and although we work hard on every piece we publish, there are some that are more in-depth than others. You could argue that all of Moths and Giraffes is a passion project, but these pieces are the Passion Projects within the passion project!
Greta Isaac.
Our first year was naturally full of passion projects. We began with virtually no industry connections and almost no clue on how any of this could work. Most of all, I just wanted to write, and maybe even tell a story or two. This is one of those stories, and only the fifth article published on Moths and Giraffes.
This piece charted Welsh powerhouse Greta Isaac’s Creatures Of Habit singles, the first time I became truly absorbed in an artist’s ‘era’. Every social media post was a cryptic clue. All the songs centred on various characters, how behaviour influenced decisions and how we are all ‘creatures of habit’ in some way.
It begins with Facebook, and a sponsored ad in early 2017. The unnerving ‘Don’t Tell’ seemed to be Greta Isaac’s first single – I found out later her two previous EPs had already been pulled from the internet to make way for the music that was to come. Over the next year I’d see Isaac live multiple times and only once did one of those older songs feature in a setlist.
There were no photos of Greta on her social media, only the obscured one featured above. With each successive single, I was pulled in further, culminating with a secret gig in Brixton that debuted all this new music live, plus more that was never released. I met Greta multiple times, asking her all the details behind this project that had me so gripped – much of this information is included in the piece, paraphrased and extracted from my journal entries written in 2017 and 2018.
A Creatures of Habit album was one of the things Greta said might’ve been in the works, but this never happened, and neither has any form of album (except her collaborative one as a quarter of the supergroup FIZZ). Greta returned in 2020 and 2021 with the singles for her ‘PESSIMIST’ EP and continued into 2022 with her six-track follow-up ‘I Think You’d Hate It Here’. 2025 has seen Greta Isaac release two projects, as herself with the ‘Productive Pain’ EP and a further four songs as her alter-ego Dolly Zoom.
Despite not interviewing Greta Isaac for this piece, it still gets views every week from fans eager to know her earlier music. As if to compound the mysteriousness of The Creatures of Habit era – Greta Isaac has since scrubbed all the music videos from the internet. But the songs remain on streaming services, for now…
Follow Greta Isaac on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok @gretaisaac.
Catherine Ireton.
By our tenth piece, we’d already interviewed several indie artists, written a piece on how different musicians took to livestreaming during the early pandemic, and penned our first article where an artist contacted us first(!) This article on Irish songwriter Catherine Ireton was also another milestone, the first time we’d spoken to a performer over the phone. Not just an email Q&A, but a conversation about her work that twisted and turned and even featured a moment where her son had woken from his nap and we had to pause the conversation!
Our chat centred on her theatre production of ‘For All The Fires Not Yet Lit’, a one-woman, hour-long piece focussing on everyday bravery and courage. Claire was mid-hangover the morning after having her and her husband-to-be’s parents round…and she didn’t have any milk. Going to the corner shop in her pyjamas, Claire feels a moment of bravery and boards a bus heading for a protest that lands her happily in a police cell overnight. The whole twenty-four-hour period reshapes Claire’s personality and outlook on life.
‘For All The Fires’ wasn’t billed as a musical or a play, it was a ‘Sung Story’ and visited more than ten locations on its tour of Autumn 2017. We caught the show in Margate, Kent and Catherine’s uploading of a performance of the show during the pandemic prompted us to talk to her about it. We asked Catherine if any of the show was rooted in her own experiences:
‘No it's pretty much fiction. I guess she definitely comes from my own experience of like her story of being a bride-to-be and all that, but I wrote her before I even met my now-husband. I think at the time I was performing it, we had gotten engaged but I had written it before I had even met or started to write it and started to write that whole scene about this kind of overbearing mother and this very timid daughter before I met my husband. So I guess none of that was- that story part of it wasn't, but maybe the scenes are more something that I can more relate to personally.’
Though Catherine Ireton has maintained a lower profile concerning her own writing and performing, recently she has been involved in the Limerick-centred production of ‘Connie’ under vocal supervision and vocal arrangements. ‘Connie’ is about the Limerick-born actress Constance Smith, who went on to Hollywood fame in the 1950’s, even presenting at the 1952 Academy Awards. The production ran between October and November 2025 at the Limerick Theatre Royal (the first public performances there for thirty years) and featured an all-female cast, archive film and an original score recorded by the Irish Chamber Orchestra.
Follow Catherine Ireton on Instagram @cathsaye and on Facebook @catherineireton.
Julia Beyer and Harald Löwy of Chandeen. Image Credit: Julia Beyer.
‘The title is just a wordplay, Julia is very interested in astrology and I am fascinated of everything within and outside our solar system. Mercury Retrograde is a word for both: astrology and astronomy. We thought it fits perfectly, also because of the spacy sound of the album.’ - Harald Löwy
Also in 2020, one of my favourite albums of this decade was released – Chandeen’s ‘Mercury Retrograde’. It would be almost a year before I’d publish a piece on it, possibly the most comprehensive article written on this album. At the time the German band Chandeen were a duo consisting of multi-instrumentalist Harald Löwy and vocalist Julia Beyer. One of the things that makes this album so exciting for me is the variation of perspectives, given to the songs by the varying collaborators Chandeen worked with on this album.
‘Most of the time my lyrics come from deep within my subconscious and it happens very often that I only recognize the inspirations behind it after I hear the finished song. I think that's a pretty magical process as it sometimes even helps me to understand some phases I went through or times in my life better. It sometimes feels as if my subconscious is writing letters to me through my lyrics.’ – Julia Beyer
Naturally then, the vision for this piece wouldn’t be just to interview the band duo, but also their collaborators to build a picture of how this glorious, dreamy and engaging album was put together. Opening with the instrumental ‘Summer’s Fling’, Julia would write and perform on three of the tracks, including the singles ‘Vanish’ and ‘All Ghosts’. Harald and Julia would also work with an instrumental collaborator across the album, Florian Walther. I particularly loved the drum sound on ‘Mercury Retrograde’, and was surprised to hear it was more digital than it first seemed:
‘For the way we write and record it's crucial that I can dial in a sound in seconds to catch that moment of inspiration, and to be honest, there's virtually no difference in the sound quality. It would just take much longer if I took my vintage equipment and fooled around with it for hours to get it to sound like that. The drums varied from time to time. I have an old Ludwig Kit from the 70's, that we used on some recordings, but for the same reasons that I mentioned before, we extensively used a tiny Roland E-drum kit with different sample-libraries, that gave us immediate great sounds, but with the feel of a real drummer.’ - Florian Walther
As well as Julia Beyer singing, Mercury Retrograde also played host to three other vocalists. The elusive Odile sang on the single ‘Ocean Mind’, with lyrics penned by French songwriter KITTY. The latter would deliver a captivating spoken-word segment on Harald’s favourite track ‘’Cause It’s Slow’, written by American sound-designer Jennifer Pague. Having written and performed the lyric, KITTY would also star in the dazzling video for ‘You’re In A Trance’.
‘I was in Wales during the summer that I shot the video. Harry gave me a rough storyline and plenty of ideas and I tried to make it happen to the best of my abilities!! My mum and brother also helped me out for a lot of the shots so it was definitely a family effort too. Some of it was filmed in the Marteg Valley, which is only a couple of minutes from my grandmother's house and we also drove to the beach in Borth to shoot some of the other scenes.’ - KITTY
Chandeen’s final collaborator on this project is the reason we ever knew about the album at all. Holly Henderson is a songwriter in our locale we’d been following for a while, and it was her Instagram post that highlighted Mercury Retrograde for us when it came out. She’d sing and write lyrics for ‘I Don’t Care If I’m Wasted’ and album-closer ‘Light’, which featured something of a bonus track at its conclusion:
‘They were very open to ideas, I felt comfortable giving a little more melodically/vocally, and giving some choice and fat to trim. I remember writing a little extra on this one, and at the time, the track wasn’t so fully formed, so it’s less that it was a later addition, it was one of those happy accidents, where we were both throwing ideas at the wall and something unexpected stuck.’ – Holly Henderson
In January 2025, Chandeen released their latest album ‘the last glimpse of your life’. While Chandeen is still a duo, vocalist Julia Beyer has decided to leave the project, with instrumentalist Florian Walther becoming a full member. Their latest album is still a collaborative one however, though instead of multiple songwriters, the album benefits from the continuous presence of Amsterdam vocalist and lyricist Chris Richter. Expanding their sound, the less ambiguous ‘last glimpse’ is an album for a new generation of Chandeen fans.
Follow Chandeen on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok @chandeenmusic.
Jena Malone and Lem Jay Ignacio are The Shoe. Image Courtesy of Jena Malone.
‘I went to New York to do a Broadway play. And I was in New York for almost nine months, and it’s there that the freestyle/making music just took off. So I had a little tape recorder and I would just be in the back of taxicabs, non-stop freestyling. Like people thought I had- like I thought I had singing Tourette’s, you know?’ – Jena Malone
‘Where do I know that actress from?’ I said to myself in 2013 after seeing ‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’ in the cinema. The actress’ name was Jena Malone, and I’d seen her in ‘Contact’ many years previously. But during this journey through the brain fog I discovered another thing – Jena Malone was also a musician. So the next nine months or so were spent disappearing down the rabbit hole of Jena’s solo material as Jena Malone and Her Bloodstains, as well as her more recent music as The Shoe.
‘Jena was always scouting places around Los Angeles that were surprising and would make me laugh. Like a place I’d never heard of here called Happy Valley or a liquor store parking lot or in front of a laundromat. I think Fletcher Drive in Frogtown brings back good old memories. It’s this patch of semi-dry grass on a corner lot and like always, we’d tell people at the very last minute that we were going to do a show and friends and strangers would show up to hear us play. Those early shows felt super spontaneous, unrehearsed and totally improvised. It was half busking, half pop-up performance.’ – Lem Jay Ignacio
The timing of my getting into this music may or may not have been a fortunate accident. Jena Malone is an artist who creates freely without time constraints and outside pressures, the music she’s made both as a solo artist and with Lem Jay Ignacio as The Shoe has always been ready, when it’s ready. So in retrospect, being around in 2014 to witness the release of their debut album ‘I’m Okay’ and to catch them on their only London date (and the only international tour they undertook) was a lucky right-place-right-time situation.
‘I think our very first show was we just invited a bunch of people over to his garage and just kinda did it through Pro Tools, had other people play like James Valentine who works with Maroon 5 and a bunch of people did stuff, it was pretty cool.’ – Jena Malone
This also put me in a good position to chronicle the band’s timeline since that story was documented in my concert journal back in 2014. I had hand-drawn CD-R’s (created by Malone’s sibling, for an allowance) sent to me by Jena Malone’s own mother, who in 2013 still ran the record label that released those early albums. I had a screen-printed cloth from 2008, a polaroid taken by the band in 2014, a full audio recording I’d made of their gig in London, and much more besides – information that otherwise might be lost. It was my dream to write their story, and in 2022, Moths and Giraffes Article #156 became a reality.
“Most of the time we get together we just press record and improvise for hours until I get tired and go to sleep. And then Jena keeps recording and when I get up in the morning I go to my computer and listen to all the things she’s recorded while I was sleeping. We’ve thought about releasing some of those pieces that turned out closer to complete ideas or songs. Jena wanted to name it ‘B-sides’ but we never did.” – Lem Jay Ignacio
‘There is a video that we still haven’t released for ‘I Guess This Is My Man’. I mean I should just release it, I’ve been thinking about, you know, where to do it. It’s really cool! It’s my friend M Blash, he directed it and edited it and all the footage is from all of the years of audition videos that I’ve done.’ – Jena Malone
This article was in the making for around two years, with a lot of back and forth between the artists which resulted in a Q&A with Lem Jay Ignacio, and a full Zoom meeting with Jena Malone. Not only did Jena send me photos she’d collected of the band over the years, she also gave me access to an unpublished freestyle The Shoe had made that later became their album track ‘His Shirt Grew’. Although an attempt was made to procure the unreleased music video for ‘I Guess This Is My Man’, that eventually saw release in 2023.
With a combination of these photographs, videos, audio recordings, new and archive interviews, this story of Jena Malone and Lem Jay Ignacio’s musical journey as The Shoe is the most comprehensive telling of their history. It’s the longest piece we’ve ever written, the deepest of all our dives, and something we truly hope the fans find and cherish. Our gratitude still goes out to Jena and Lem Jay for giving us their time and making it one we’ll never forget.
Follow Jena Malone on Instagram @jenamalone, Facebook @jena.malone and on Twitter @malonejena.
Follow Lem Jay Ignacio on Instagram @lemjayig.
Follow The Shoe on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter @theshoeperforms.
Cassandra Jenkins. Image Credit: Pooneh Ghana.
Our latest passion project piece centres around Cassandra Jenkins’ ‘My Light, My Destroyer’ album, an article that began on a smaller scale, but grew to tell the story of this album from multiple perspectives, including my own.
“I probably wrote, ‘I got the job at the flower shop,’ in my notebook dozens of times before I figured out how to follow it up. The rest of the song was a somewhat osmotic process—over time, I absorbed my surroundings and became intimately acquainted with cut flowers and the personal meaning began to hold. I wrote endless verses to this song over the course of six years, and even after I had dialled in the remaining three, I was whittling away at the lyrics right up until the last minute.” – Cassandra Jenkins
The story is non-linear, beginning from my consumer perspective of discovering Cassandra’s latest (at the time) single, ‘Delphinium Blue’. Cassandra herself comments on the writing of the song. Producer Andrew Lappin offers the most thorough point of view across the making of the whole album.
‘Cassandra is wonderful to work with in the studio and beyond. We definitely saw eye to eye on this record thematically and sonically, and were generally aligned on almost everything. I credit this to extensive conversations we'd have before we even got into the studio. We got on the same page very early on.’ – Andrew Lappin
But the testimonies didn’t stop there. We wanted to capture the story of this record from multiple angles, from Cassandra’s inspiration to working with co-writers, producing the record and performing it live. Stephanie Marziano co-wrote the first single ‘Only One’ in an Airbnb writing session in Los Angeles that included long hikes and a hot tub playlist.
‘Every writing session is different, but with Cassandra, it was really cathartic. The Airbnb had a grand piano in the living room, so we just sat there or on the sofa with guitars. I vividly remember the moment Cassandra sang the chorus melody for the first time—it was so exciting. We actually re-wrote the verses about 15 times to make sure they served the chorus perfectly. By the end of those few days, we had a rough demo that sounded pretty poppy at the time. I think I had to convince Cassandra that the final version wouldn’t turn out like that! Ha. We ended up rewriting parts and lyrics over Zoom a bunch more times, but the chorus melody always stayed. We also took a lot of breaks to hike and be out in nature. Sometimes when you’re writing songs, you can get stuck trying to finish something on the spot and end up going in circles. Being in LA, we really focused on letting the surroundings inspire us instead of trying to force anything.’ – Stephanie Marziano
Our final contributor tied in with our own experience of seeing Jenkins live at EartH Theatre in London, the last date on the tour. Faye Thompson is a saxophonist that had previously joined Cassandra and her band for shows in 2022. Her performance on this particular date was a one-off, which would’ve been scary, right?
‘As predominantly an improvising musician, I spend a lot of time doing gigs where you're taking risks and putting trust in yourself and the people you're playing with, so it wasn't as scary as it could have been! It helps that the band all know each other and are friends so we know we've got each other if something doesn't go quite right. I think sometimes that all-or-nothing feeling from shows like that can actually help push the music further in the moment.’ – Faye Thompson
This twisty-turny telling of ‘My Light, My Destroyer’ became one of the most unique pieces we’ve ever written. It’s shifting of perspectives from consumer to writing to backstory to live performance was a challenging and rewarding one to achieve, helped by additional materials from the artists themselves. This piece featured the work of no fewer than eight photographers. Especially notable are the sets contributed by Stephanie Marziano illustrating the ‘Only One’ songwriting sessions, and the studio shots from Cassandra herself. These and the live shots from the audience at EartH were vital to telling the story of this gorgeous record…
…which Cassandra Jenkins has since expanded on. Over the summer, she released the companion to the album - ‘My Light, My Massage Parlor’. This combination of piano reimagining and field recording frames the album in a new light, a record playing in the context of a massage parlour, and also the record itself. Cassandra has released both editions so that the listener may be inside the massage parlour, as well as creating their own relaxation environment with the original recording.
Follow Cassandra Jenkins on Instagram @cassandrajenkins and on Facebook @CassandraJenkinsOfficial.
Like any list, it’s mandatory to have some honourable mentions! Our piece on Van Dyke Parks celebrated his reunion with Brian Wilson on the 1995 album ‘Orange Crate Art’, spurred on by a 2020 reissue. At the end of that year we conducted a long form interview with Roxanne de Bastion to chronicle her career up to that point, focussing especially on her current album ‘Heirlooms & Hearsay’. In 2021, Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett released his latest album, ‘Under A Mediterranean Sky’. We spoke with Steve on the phone about his classical influences and his travels through the region that inspired the delicate instrumental record.
That same year, we put together a history of Al Jardine’s lead vocal and songwriting contributions to The Beach Boys catalogue, with an exclusive interview, a piece that has remained in our Top Ten Most Viewed list ever since. Fast-forwarding to 2023, we wrote a history of Arizona band Grey Daze from their beginnings in the early 90’s to the eve of playing their first gig in twenty-five years, helped by an interview with drummer Sean Dowdell. Another staple of the Top Ten.
Celebrating the release of Taylor Swift’s re-recording of her third album ‘Speak Now’, we went back to some of the artists we’ve interviewed over the years to find out what tracks by Taylor Swift have inspired them. The fifteen artists we spoke to drew from music across Swift’s catalogue, from people who’d gotten into her music as a child, or found it through a changing musical landscape.
Having released her debut album ‘Real Poetry’ (abbreviated) in 2023, we combined a review of Pacing’s album with an extended bio of her earlier work, plus additional anecdotes from co-producer Kabir Kumar. Finally, we took an emotional journey into Angie McMahon’s ‘Light, Dark, Light Again’ album in early 2024. The impact the record had on us while writing the review was phenomenal, a vulnerable converging that regularly draws new readers, climbing the Top Ten faster than any other article we’ve written.
But all of this is kind of moot if there’s nobody to read it…and there is. So thank you for visiting Moths and Giraffes. If this is your first time – welcome! If you keep coming back - thanks, a lot! Hopefully we’ll keep doing this as long as we can. Drop us a message and say hi sometime.
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We have a Spotify Playlist! Featuring almost every artist we've written about on Moths and Giraffes, find some new music here.
For submissions, or if you’d just like to send us your thoughts, don’t hesitate to contact us via our social media accounts, our contact page, or via email at mothsandgiraffes@outlook.com. We receive a lot of emails though, so please bear with us!
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