ALMOST two decades in the making, Kathryn Joseph’s 2015 debut album Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled gave the Inverness-born singer, songwriter and musician phenomenal success and went on to win that year’s Scottish Album of the Year.

Now signed to Mogwai’s Rock Action label, Joseph is on the cusp of releasing From When I Wake the Want Is, a raw, hypnotic and haunting collection produced by long-term collaborator Marcus Mackay.

READ MORE: New collaboration for Kathryn Joseph

“It feels very different to when I was releasing the first record,” says Joseph. “I had no concept at all of who might enjoy it, or even care about it. That was actually quite nice in a way. With this record, I feel I should be more worried about it, but what Marcus has done is so strong, and so exactly what I love, that I’m just excited for people to hear it.”

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Written during a “really weird year” in which she split with her partner and moved to Glasgow, From When I Wake the Want Is induces goosebumps from the off. A song cycle drenched in longing, Joseph is cast as a traveller in the dark, uncovering and exorcising emotional wounds.

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The album will be launched next month at a series of theatrical gigs in collaboration with Glasgow-based art house Cryptic, designers James Johnson, lighting designer Nich Smith and Czech “body architect” Marketa Kratochvilova.

Kratochvilova has designed the outfit Joseph will wear, an intricate web of knots and connections made from rope. It has resonance with a passage director Josh Armstrong wrote about his ideas for the show.

“Within each of us lies dormant passion and memories secreted away in the depths of our DNA. Through this visualised concert, Kathryn explores what happens when these etchings awake and painfully break through the tender flesh which held them tightly hidden.”

“When I read that, what Josh had written, I was like, ‘Yes, that’s allowed’,” says Joseph. “It’s really beautiful but it’s not my words. It’s definitely how I feel about the songs. I love it. That’s how that year was for me, it’s a physical thing that you feel in your body, you’re physically reacting to how you are feeling emotionally.

“You’re not with that person but you still feel all that in your body. I’ve never felt that amount of miss before. I hadn’t told Josh about that but he seemed to get it.”

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Joseph says she’s very lucky with the people she works with, from her musical collaborators and the team behind these shows to the artist friends who make her videos and album artwork.

“They make exactly what I want, and it’s really weird as in some ways, I am very particular,” she says. “I want whatever people do, for it to be theirs, in the same way that I would want to do it that way. It’s important to me they make something they love.”

There’s an almost primordial starkness, an unadorned honesty to Joseph’s work that people seem to “get” instinctively.

“When I listened to her debut album around 2015, I was really drawn to her music and to her personality that comes out in the music,” recounts Armstrong, an associate director with Cryptic as well as the director of these special album launch performances.

He continues: “Pretty much every song on Kathryn’s album is deeply personal, like emotional histories. There is often a desire to hide those histories, those scars or blemishes, these things that we carry. But when she’s performing she has this extraordinary ability to present this internal life, this turning inside out of the flesh.

“She’s quite shy out of performance mode, and there’s almost this animalistic otherness that comes when she performs, like she is impenetrable. The thing that makes her impenetrable is that she is baring the innards as opposed to trying to present a perfect outer.”

That baring of deep emotion, of marking the moment when secrets break, is what Armstrong wishes to explore in these intimate shows.

“For me, the focus of the performance is Kathryn herself and her music,” he says. “Everything that myself and the other collaborators are looking at are ways that we can augment or emphasise the raw, tender beauty of the world Kathryn lives in. Everyone that’s involved in this project, the design of each element, its materiality, its realness is very important. She has this bespoke piece to wear that’s very detailed, and that has informed how we construct the set, the installation she inhabits.”

The National: Kathryn Joseph: Wearing something that someone else has made is very much about me becoming stronger

“This tour, wearing something that someone else has made, is very much about me becoming stronger,” says Joseph. “I’m completely different in real life to when I’m playing music. I feel when I’m playing music that it’s more the truth of me. It’s the one time I don’t feel paranoid, I don’t care about what I look like or what people think of me. I would love to go through my life feeling great, but if I was, maybe I wouldn’t be writing songs.”

She adds: “Speaking in between songs, on the radio, I never thought I would be able to do it. But I love playing live, and now I am OK with the other things too. It’s nice to feel at this point in my life, that I’ve got better at doing things.”

From When I Wake the Want Is is released via Rock Action on August 10.

Sep 13, Glasgow Tramway; Sep 14 Edinburgh Summerhall; Sep 15 Stirling Tolbooth; Sep 17 Perth Horsecross. www.kathrynjoseph.co.uk cryptic.org.uk