Thea Gilmore turns anonymous messages into The Echo Line songs

By Marcus Bennett

Thea Gilmore received 150 messages within two days of launching The Echo Line in January. Her fourth and latest song, He Walks Like War, drew more than 10,000 listens before the website removed it.

At 46, the Oxford singer-songwriter runs the project without management, a label or a press team. She had not known whether anyone would call or notice it. “This project has changed my whole thinking,” Gilmore said. “What am I getting from it? All of humanity.”

Gilmore said disillusionment with the numbers-chasing music industry had driven her to seek a break from personal songwriting. She had released 22 folk-orientated albums since 1998 and was “putting people back at the centre of it. I’ve said enough about me.”

Gilmore said community building had been key to her work since Burning Dorothy, released when she was 18. Her catalogue continued through her 2000s breakthrough albums Avalanche and Harpo’s Ghost and her 2023 studio album Thea Gilmore. She said Bruce Springsteen, Richard Thompson and collaborator Joan Baez have expressed admiration for that work.

From anonymous message to temporary song

Gilmore compared The Echo Line to a musical version of Nick Cave’s interactive fan-advice column The Red Hand Files. Through its website, she invites people to leave anonymous voicemails or written messages about anything they choose.

The submissions include:

• hopes and dreams;
• fears and confessions;
• triumphs and tribulations.

Gilmore said thousands have responded with bravery and honesty. She writes a song inspired by one or more submissions and uploads it to the website for a limited period.

She initially limited each song to one week. She explained: “music is so disposable and available all the time, I wanted to see what happened if I took it away again”. Demand for He Walks Like War persuaded her to keep that song online for several weeks.

Even as the community grows, Gilmore listens to and reads every message. “Listening has become increasingly undervalued in my lifetime. But it’s a powerful act. People more and more feel very alone. And I think what they’re getting from this is they know they’re actually being listened to, with no judgement,” she said.

She called anonymity essential to the project’s integrity: “It’s really important to the integrity of the project that people know it’s genuinely an anonymous safe place.”

Gilmore said she had not been prepared for the emotional scale of the messages. Recurring themes included:

• grief, loss and heartbreak;
• estrangement, especially from parents;
• pride and worries about children;
• the overwhelm of the modern world;
• distrust of elites.

Many messages, she said, described people overcoming adversity. Gilmore described one about surviving an intruder attack at home as “like a Tarantino script”.

Gilmore also found joy in the submissions. Her favourite concerned the interconnectivity of mushrooms growing in the ground. “In my bonkers songwriter brain, I’m like: that’s what this whole thing is about! We’re all connected, just like fungus,” she said.

What does The Echo Line change for Gilmore’s songwriting?

It shifts the weight of authorship from Gilmore’s own life to other people’s stories. She described the trust placed in her as a delicate gift. “As a songwriter you feel emboldened in some respects because they obviously think I can do a good job with their story,” she said.

“But it is really tough. Because it’s not my pain. You’re making sure you do other people’s lives justice. There’s a weight of responsibility in that.”

Gilmore’s first three songs unfold as spectral ballads, each carrying anonymous testimony into a public musical form.

Blood Bike combines three messages: one from a blood-bike worker delivering neonatal breast milk to hospitals; one from an overworked NHS nurse; and one from a mother whose daughter was born prematurely. Gilmore said: “They’re human stories that show we’re all connected, and this light went on – I was like: this is exactly what I wanted this to be.”

Silvie comes from a relationship of 30 years ago, cut short by a road accident. The contributor’s partner family forbade a proper goodbye, and the pain remained. Gilmore said: “That person’s message started ‘I don’t talk much about Silvie anymore’,” adding: “Those words just sat on top of your heart like a weight.”

The Lines (Greg) grew from a long-distance relationship conducted entirely online. Greg died by suicide. The contributor is now happily married but still felt unable to discuss the relationship’s importance.

Gilmore said: “they felt they couldn’t talk about it or explain to people that it had been so important to them. And I really wanted to honour that in a song, that some of the most transformative relationships can be outside the bounds of what society says you can do.”

He Walks Like War followed messages from across the political spectrum: disillusionment and anger at the billionaire class, tech bros and insidious algorithms dividing society. Gilmore said: “You can see the same frustrations in completely different types of people. There are a lot of people out there who feel completely disenfranchised.”

The Echo Line now operates 24/7. Gilmore is working on the next song, due by the end of October. “A very happy song, one of the most beautiful stories framed in the most beautiful way,” she said.

Her ambitions include gallery events and live shows. “I would love to see this grow. For me, this is a sort of project that when I die, I’ll be like: that’s what I was meant to do.”

The next test for Gilmore is whether The Echo Line can sustain gallery events and live shows without losing the anonymous trust that has brought thousands of people to it.