Annabel Jones On Grief, And The Pivotal Role Of Music In Her Life – clashmusic.com

Annabel Jones thought she knew where she was heading – with a close-knit team around her, she felt ready to share her music with the world. In the space of a few weeks, however, her world was changed irrevocably, and her life altered forever.
Losing her husband, Ryan Brady, and her best friend, Max Perenchio in a tragic accident, Annabel felt herself tumbling into grief. Gradually, her life came back into focus, and music played a key role in re-establishing structure amid the chaos.
New EP ‘Forgiveness’ is out on June 13th, a move that closes a five year hiatus. The title song is one of the last pieces of music she worked on with Ryan and Max, and releasing it is a moment of deeply personal catharsis.
She says…
“I just can’t let it disappear away and have nobody hear this work that they were so passionate and excited about. I also feel this sense of responsibility to share more of their gifts with the world”.
New single ‘Hotline To Heaven’ is out now, and in this moving reflection Annabel Jones discusses her experiences, and offers empathy to those who have lost a loved one.
—
—
Music was an outlet for me – like most songwriters it was a place I went to express myself and process my experiences. All that has changed now. Music has become a place I go to be with the dead. 
On November 24th 2020 I sat around the kitchen table with my husband Ryan and best friend Max in the house we all shared in LA. It was COVID times and we had pooled our resources to rent a larger home with space for a studio, garden and two other floors for living and working. We were starting a new company together, paid label services for indie artists who needed help, structure and a team. Max, my best friend, was producer and songwriter, I was the creative director and stylist and Ryan my husband was the business guy – the front man.
That night I had cooked for us, gnocchi with pesto. We sat and talked about our families, a mostly funny but at moments difficult conversation that required some, shall we say, energetic clearing in place of pudding. This clearing was to be done in the form of listening, very loudly, to KISS who Max loved and Ryan had, I’m sure, come to love in order to better understand his friend. I was quite firm in my opinion that KISS, while undeniably brilliant, were not for me and that I’d rather go to bed with the weight of our conversation than Gene Simmons, so I headed up. We had friends to host the next day and the prospect made me feel sensible. It would be Thanksgiving and I’d need to be a good hostess. 
At about 4am I woke up and Ryan wasn’t in bed. I thought nothing of it in that moment and opened my phone to look at Instagram. I shared memes with a friend in Chicago, there’s an image in my head of a white staffy smiling. Funny the things you remember from times like those.  After about an hour of scrolling I began to have an uneasy feeling. I became aware of the sound of helicopters and sirens that were the usual background noise of L.A, but felt more close and ominous now for some reason. 
The boys would stay up late, a lot actually, but 5am was really quite unusual for my very disciplined husband. I got out of bed and walked to the window. Our view was of a very beautiful grave yard, it flanked us. I had liked the idea of the graveyard when we looked at the house as they are one of the only truly quiet  and peaceful places in the city. You would see deer grazing, the only other place I would see deer in that city was splayed on the side of the 101 freeway. I noticed there was a car missing, my stomach turned slightly. I made my way across our room and toward the door trying to convince myself that my thoughts and feelings weren’t real. The house seemed too still. I carried on along the hallway and down the stairs and as I did this an unfathomably large and catastrophic ‘something’ washed over me. Every cell in my body began responding to an outcome I hadn’t yet known for certain to be true. I paused, then stepped off the last stair in to the living room, a moment that felt like it lasted ten days. I knew that when my foot reached the ground it would all be real. I knew with every fiber of my being that Ryan and Max were dead.   
You hear people say this a lot, “I knew she was dead” or “I was sitting in my car and felt breathless, that was the moment he died in another state” or something like it.  But until you experience it, I can’t begin to tell you how real  it is. The world just feels different, it sounds different, it looks different. It was as though I could feel the loss of their resonance.
Ryan, Max and I were just about to release my debut album ‘Forgiveness’ that we’d spent two years making. We’d put out one song about a week before called ‘Spiritual Violence’, the video was to be released Thanksgiving week (needless to say it never was). The album was about loss of innocence, it was a love letter to the English countryside and my lonely, confusing and beautiful childhood there. 
It was about my Dad both in his life and death. My Dad was a very complicated man, also an artist and other worldly successful as the front man of a group called The Monkees. A working class lad from Manchester who just wanted to be a jockey but couldn’t miss the opportunity to “get out” and change the trajectory of his and his families lives. He would tell me the story of how he cried in his fathers arms and begged to stay with them at home in Openshaw but his father exclaimed with love laced toughness, “I never want to see you in a pair of overalls, son”.
The more I understand grief the more I understand that ‘Forgiveness’ was about the lifetime of grief we absorbed through our proximity to Dad. Perhaps we were born with his grief already living in us. The loss of his mother at age 14, the loss of his life in his comfortable home filled with sisters and noise and love, the loss of his Dad who he couldn’t reach in time, the loss of his real dream of being a jockey. Forgiveness was as much about all of that as it was about me losing Dad. But these songs are no longer all they were, they’re something more now. They are also where I go to be with Ryan and Max. Hearing their fingers tap piano keys or slide along the neck of a guitar, I am back in those exact moments with them, dancing. Their frequencies are forever held in my body.
If our story and the music we made can help others as they navigate their grief journey then the risk I feel in sharing it will be justified.  For the last five years I have held ‘Forgiveness’ close to me like the most painful secret, but I can’t do that anymore because it was made with so much love, so much passion and life and I won’t let it die too. 
Annabel Jones, March 2025. 

Join us on WeAre8, as we get under the skin of global cultural happenings. Follow Clash Magazine HERE as we skip merrily between clubs, concerts, interviews and photo shoots. Get backstage sneak-peeks and a view into our world as the fun and games unfold.
 

source