Alice Vincent: rediscovering music after trauma
The New Statesman | UK politics and culture
The New Statesman
4.4 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 19 May 2025
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In our teenage years, music can be everything.
But as we age, our relationship with music changes.
Alice Vincent was a music journalist for many years, and in this frank conversation tells Kate Mossman how childbirth, PTSD and depression turned her love of music into something darker.
In her new book, Hark: How women listen, Alice recounts her quest to rediscover the power of music as an adult, a mother and after mental health battles.
In this conversation, Alice and Kate discuss how her quest took her from an anechoic chamber in south London to the Mojave desert - and how music is finally returning to her life.
Hark: How women listen is available to buy here: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/11114/9781805302063
Read Kate Mossman's review here: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2025/04/sounds-that-shape-us
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What do you want for the children in your life? Happiness, health, success? |
| 0:05.2 | All children deserve the best start we can give them. |
| 0:08.5 | But after 14 years of austerity, COVID and the cost of living crisis, |
| 0:13.7 | child poverty is at a record high in the UK. |
| 0:17.1 | The government must act decisively to make life better for kids. |
| 0:22.2 | It must invest in our social security system and remove the two-child limit, or child poverty will continue to rise. |
| 0:30.5 | Read Child Poverty Action Group's piece in this week's magazine. |
| 0:36.8 | The New Statesman. |
| 0:42.5 | For many teenagers, music is everything. |
| 0:50.3 | It helps to anchor us, find our identities, give us a way to voice new and strange emotions. |
| 0:57.8 | As Alice Vincent, once a music-obsessed teenager, writes, there was a time in my life when sound felt like it was everything to me because it moved my body and it smoothed my brain and elevated my being to higher planes. |
| 1:12.1 | Our relationship with music undoubtedly changes as we get older. |
| 1:16.0 | Is this sense of music as an intense solitary communion |
| 1:18.9 | somehow incompatible with the demands of adult life? |
| 1:22.7 | What happens when we have children? |
| 1:24.6 | And why? |
| 1:26.9 | In her new book, Hark, How Women Listen, Alice, who is also gardening columnist for the |
| 1:32.1 | New Statesman, narrates her own personal quest to rediscover sound, which takes her on a journey |
| 1:36.9 | into understanding how women in particular relate to the world around them through listening. |
| 1:43.3 | And Alice joins me in the studio. |
| 1:45.1 | Hi, Alice. |
| 1:45.8 | Hello. |
... |
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