Clara Mann :: Wishbone
Folk ballads on trust: Clara Mann stops carrying her songs alone.
The bridge Leos Carax films in Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) was not in Paris: it was built in a field near Lansargues, in the Hérault, once shooting on the real Pont-Neuf became impossible. Clara Mann watched the film on a laptop screen while working on her second record, and the idea of love she took from it has something of the building site about it.
Rift, her debut, released on state51 in March 2025, was the work of a songwriter used to writing alone; for Mann, the purest version of those songs had always been a girl on her own in a large hall. Wishbone, out on the same label on 23 October 2026, instead began as demos and voice memos that Mann brought to Bam Bam Studios in Norfolk, where the days with Fabian Prynn (production, mixing, drums) ran to fourteen hours. Playing with them were two musicians Mann barely knew, guitarist Kit Mosely and double bassist Marianne Schofield, and three longtime friends: Owen Spafford on viola, Martin Egidi on cello, Tennessee Woodiel on banjo.
Mann sets the wishbone, the bone two people pull between them, beside Rest Energy, the 1980 performance in which Marina Abramović and Ulay hold a bow taut with the weight of their bodies. The arrow points at her heart, and two small microphones on their chests record their heartbeats quickening for a little over four minutes. A bow can stay whole. A wishbone breaks every time: one person is left with the long piece, the other with a splinter of bone between their fingers, and the record lives almost entirely in the tension before the snap.
Devotion may be the central word on Wishbone. Introducing “All My Devotion”, Mann described a family in which devotion to other people, to a way of living and to the work of one’s own hands was something learned every day. The statement offers a way into the record without settling it. In the music, devotion is measured in distances: how close a voice can come while leaving space around itself, how long an instrument can accompany it while leaving its uncertainty intact.
In “The Izaak Walton Hotel” only voice and piano remain, at a solemn pace, the intimacy left to the slightest shifts in dynamics. In “Oblivion” Spafford’s viola and the weight of Prynn’s drums rough up the surface of the song with country inflections.
Mann is most convincing when devotion sounds difficult, even uncomfortable, and the arrangements allow that discomfort to remain.
