Generational Transmission is the latest single from the groundbreaking artist Marsha Swanson, who is known for her emotionally charged songs and innovative soundscapes. Swanson is back with a stunning music video. This release marks Swanson’s fifth collaboration with director Sam Chegini and continues her journey alongside producer Iestyn Polson (David Gray, David Bowie) and a talented team of musicians, including Benjamin Croft, Graham Knight, Alex McGowan, and Henry Thomas. Read below for our conversation with Marsha Swanson.
Your work often explores identity and memory. How do you personally engage with your own family history when writing music?
When a song is brewing and ready to come out, I head to the piano to find out what is already there. Uncovering thoughts, like a detective at work, it is a case of following ethereal threads and grasping them before they disappear! Rarely do I have a conscious say in the subject matter. Writing is the process of discovering what is on my mind, trusting that what is most important will come to the surface. Inevitably, this will include family, significant people and events. Personal identity is forged by experience, personal characteristics, family relationships, beliefs and societal influence over time. Any artist’s work is inescapably imbued with their unique perspective.
Generational Transmission reflects on inherited trauma and resilience. How do you navigate balancing personal vulnerability with artistic expression?
Once a song has been written, it has already undergone many transformations in order to be there. Writing will not happen if I am too raw, so a song might come out several years later when I am less vulnerable. Creativity is self-protective in this way. Songs are rarely as straight forwardly biographical as they may appear, and that is the beauty of creative licence. Like a dream, characters can be interchangeable and symbolic rather than literal.
Claymation is a very tactile, deliberate medium. Did the physicality of clay influence how you approached the song itself, or vice versa?
Vice versa. The song was written first and as soon as director Sam Chegini heard it, he knew that clay was the perfect medium for this story. The visible colour changes that occur when clays are merged, combined with its physicality and mouldability made it metaphorically magnificent.
In the video, colour and form evolve across generations. How do you see visual metaphor complementing musical storytelling?
When sound finds its reflection in image, you can no longer imagine one existing without the other. You see what you hear and you hear what you see! This is what we set out to achieve.
You’ve cited artists like Sting, Peter Gabriel, Fiona Apple, and Carole King as influences. How do these inspirations manifest in your songwriting without feeling derivative?
Influences are not consciously drawn upon or chosen, but exist inside us in the same way that all our experiences do. We cannot separate ourselves from our environment, but the way that we interact with the vast sea inside us becomes a kind of creative hot pot.
Music and memory often intersect in your work. Do you see music as a tool to preserve personal history, or to reinterpret it?
Both. When my daughter was aged 4, I chose to record her laugh for inclusion on a children’s album that I was a writer on, “Amanda’s Action Club”. I knew it was a way for me to bottle it forever, preserving both the sound and the emotions it evoked. Other times, songs have become the lens with which to reshape my stories through, arriving at something completely new. When my brother died prematurely to cancer, I sampled a rough demo recording of his voice in order to sing alongside him for what became “Like an Angel”. It wasn’t a true historical record of a real memory because we were never in the same room, but the song gave me a means to sing in harmony with him forever, and in doing so to re-write history! Making a record is one of those rare activities that is both literal and metaphorical. The literal record is the physical medium, the vinyl disc itself, whereas the metaphorical record is the memento of the past. I am grateful for both.
You mention moments of reflection brought on by children or family. How do these life transitions shape your creative voice?
Greatly. Reflection is the biggest precursor to creation and family life will never be short of things to reflect upon! On my mother’s 70’s birthday, I was reflecting on her life and what she had given me. Grand speeches are often reserved for memorials but I wanted to express my appreciation while she was still alive and could hear it. I knew I could do this best via song. The result, “Loves not late” centres around the reliability of love. The original opening line was the lyric “You taught me how to be a mother”. For public release, we changed it to “you taught me how to love another” in order to make the words applicable to anyone who has loved or been loved unconditionally.
What role does hope play in Generational Transmission? Was it important for you to show the potential for positive change across generations?
Hope plays an important role in Generational Transmission by softening the weight of inherited wounds. It reminds us that we still have volition, even if the past is heavy. Hope also offers a sense of continuity, the belief that when we transform ourselves, this can ripple onward, leaving a kinder legacy for those who follow. Showing the potential for positive change across generations was very important to me. In my work with extremely vulnerable children and young people at the charity, Kids Company, I witnessed brave souls who turned their lives around against all odds. At the centre of the song is the belief that whilst experiences shape us, they do not define us in any fixed or pre-determined way.
The song moves from intimate keyboard passages to lush, layered instrumentation. How do you decide which musical textures best serve the narrative?
Producer Iestyn Polson and I shared the initial vision for an organic live band set-up. The rhythm section was very important for creating the kind of tribal atmosphere that a song about ancestry requires. Henry Thomas wrote highly nuanced string arrangements to both support and enhance the emotion around key lyrics and to provide counterpoints for tension, build and the feeling of to and fro that you get from a conversation or question and answer.
Working with a collaborative team of musicians and producers can transform a song. Can you share a moment during production where someone else’s input completely shifted your vision?
Whilst the vision remained intact, there were some spontaneous additions that could never have been planned for but had to be included! During Violinist Benet McCleans freestyling take, we were all transfixed when these achingly beautiful sounds filled the studio like an exotic bird had just entered the space! It conjured the feeling of some non-identifiable call-to-action. He is a master at what he does and when you have the privilege to work with musicians of his callibre, there needs to be space to allow for that.
How do you approach the interplay of fragility and strength in both your lyrics and the visual storytelling of the video?
Some artists stay in the vulnerability in order to help others who feel the same way not to feel so alone. Whilst this offers companionship and is helpful at that level, the artists I most admire offer insight too. I don’t like being left in the dark without some sprinkling of wisdom, even if that is to accept that nothing different is possible. My approach to storytelling both lyrically and visually is to examine and portray the intertwined fragilities and strengths that are inherent in the human condition.
The clay figures are both personal and universal. How do you balance telling your story with creating something that resonates widely with audiences?
Humans generally have more in common than we do differences when it comes to the big things. Matters of love, loss, thriving or surviving, can apply to a vast range of individual situations. The clay figures were intended to be symbolic rather than personal. We showed an example of how war could impact multiple generations in varying interpersonal ways, leading to fears, arguments and abandonments. Most of us have experienced the wider impacts of war, whether directly or via family and friends so we thought it would resonate.
Sam says the following, “My approach in creating the puppets was to shape characters that felt human yet not tied to any specific identity, figures that could represent anyone, anywhere. For example, some characters, like the soldiers, were intentionally faceless to emphasize their universality. At the same time, I wanted each puppet to carry a personal touch, so their features and details were customized according to the emotional needs of each scene.
I collaborated with sculptor Sanaz Azimi, who first created sample models based on this idea. Then, my student, Parshan Paridokht, transformed those samples into fully functional puppets. I didn’t insist on strict adherence to the original forms, which gave us space to develop characters that felt more personal and alive. In many cases, we had to build each puppet two or even three times, so I brought together a small team of puppet builders to help with the process.
Finally, as our animator, Mehdi Khoramnia, worked with the puppets on set, he added subtle touches in movement and detail, breathing life into them. In the end, it was this combination of universality in design and individuality in execution that allowed the clay figures to feel both personal and universal.
Are there specific memories or experiences you consciously drew from, and how did you translate them into abstract or symbolic forms in music and visuals?
Yes. I realised a generational transmission was occurring between me and my daughter around her birthday celebrations. My over-the-top gifting and elaborate party planning was a defence against the memories of my own childhood birthdays. The unknown feeling I was born into and re-felt as a child at my birthday each year took years for me to understand. Just two days before my birth, was the premature death to cancer of my paternal grandmother, a time of sadness and loss for my father. I felt a sense of impending doom on my birthday each year when losing my father to his grief. The yearly repetition, at a time of supposed celebration of my birth was powerful.
One generation along, it manifested as the need to protect my daughter’s birthdays at all costs! Swinging too far to the opposite pole is still being stuck in the pattern. Since children pick up on non-verbal cues and feel when something isn’t right before they know why, it was the pleasure of being able to explain my changed behaviour to her that stayed with me for the song. The lyrics “I want you to know, so you won’t be thrown” was how my specific situation got translated into a lyric that could apply to any situation.
I saw the impact of war and the experiences for my parents of being a child or grandchild of immigrants. My grandparents rarely spoke about what they went through, though it was known and I think it was the silence that was the biggest transmission, and spoke volumes. I think this showed through in both the restrained pace and mood of the music. The contemplative textures mirror that silence — what isn’t said becomes just as powerful as what is expressed. In the claymation, the figures carry echoes of history in their bodies and movements, symbolizing how the impact of war lives on even when never voiced.
Sam highlights the following, “When working with memories, I try not to illustrate them literally, but rather to capture the essence of what they feel like. A memory is often fragmented, blurred, or heightened in certain details, so I translate those qualities into symbolic visuals instead of recreating exact events. For instance, rather than showing a specific person or place, I might use recurring shapes, textures, or movements that echo the emotions tied to that memory, grief, hope, conflict, or intimacy.
This approach allows the visuals to remain open for interpretation: they are rooted in my own personal experiences, but abstracted in a way that others can project their own memories and feelings onto them. Symbolism becomes the bridge—an image of a crumbling wall might stand for both personal loss and collective destruction, while a glowing thread can embody continuity or resilience.
By moving from the personal to the symbolic, I’m able to honour the specificity of lived experience while also creating space for a universal emotional connection with the audience”.
Beyond this project, how do you see your music evolving? Are there themes, mediums, or collaborations you are particularly eager to explore next?
The feeling after completing a project that I relish most is not knowing what will come next. Once the slate is wiped clean, if you don’t jump in to fill the space too quickly, there is a wonderful opportunity to see what emerges organically. Whilst the mediums are secondary to knowing the story, one thing I can confidently say is that future collaborations with Henry Thomas and Sam Chegini are already written in the stars! The three of us regularly have calls to discuss creative concepts and the communication, interest and mutual respect we have for each other is rare and unequivocal.
Finally, what do you hope listeners and viewers take away from Generational Transmission—emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually?
Emotionally, I hope listeners can feel compassion for the strengths and limitations we all face with our complex mix of inheritance, the gifts and the wounds. Intellectually, I hope it invites reflections on patterns of behaviour that we can examine, influencing what we carry forward. Spiritually, it opens a space for the kinds of transformations that can happen when we become aware of what we are carrying, that isn’t truly ours. I hope listeners and viewers are left with the possibility of facing and in doing so reshaping the legacy’s that would otherwise have been dealt.
