Neil Morton
FEATURED SONG OF THE WEEK
Your Story: Jessie Reid
The Woman On The Train sounds like a would-be sequel to Paula Hawkins’ best-selling novel. But no, it’s the theme of a new single by indie folk artist Jessie Reid. Your Story, our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, is billed as ‘an intimate celebration of the power of human interaction’. It is a heart-tugging tale.
‘One night on the train I met a middle-aged woman who had recently lost her husband,’ explains the Shropshire-born Reid. ‘She told her story to me and two others cramped around a table and, despite her pain, made us all laugh, listened to everyone intently and offered words of wisdom. There was something so beautiful about her strength, how she felt able to share her story with strangers, despite all she’d been through.’
Oh won’t you
Sit down beside me
Tell me the bones of your story
Where did it go wrong?
Is that what it took to make you feel so strong?
Make you feel strong
Lines on your face make a picture
Let them unfold
And you say the world is what we make it
At least that’s what we’re told
I’m just so glad you came
So glad you came
When we featured Reid on this blog with her delicious ballad Every Stranger, a meditation on learning to cope during traumatic times, we welcomed ‘a new voice of empathy’. Your Story offers fresh testimony. A regular on the last train home from London, Reid has witnessed the beauty of strangers interacting on a deeply personal level, sharing experiences of joy and anguish.
I know you loved him through the good days
You loved him through the bad ones too
You loved him through the good days
You love him now he’s gone for good
Every Stranger spoke about her own loss, now it was her turn to listen to the grief of others. ‘It struck me that many of the individuals sharing those late-night journeys had no doubt worked through their dark times but still found the strength to extend kindness and compassion to others.’
Words don’t do justice To what undid your soul
To hurt means you care, don’t be scared
I’ll be right here
I’m just so glad you came
So glad you came
Reid’s hushed, almost conversational vocal is as soothing for us as it must have been for her companion on the train. ‘Even breathing can be so hard/ With the odds stacked against you/ You’re feeling your way through the dark.’ Her percussive fingerstyle guitar is augmented by the gorgeous strings of Scottish fiddler Essa Flett and producer Joey Walker’s bass synth pads in the tender chorus.
As with earlier impressive singles Let Your Love Run Cold, Every Stranger and A Little Closer (a duet with Easymess) in the wake of 2022’s mini-album Other Hand, the Lancaster University music graduate draws on the Celtic roots of her Scottish and Welsh grandparents to create music that spreads hope amid the uncertainty and the helplessness.
Her festival appearances were followed by three recent sold-out London shows supporting Loudon Wainwright III. The acoustic stage at Glastonbury 2024 awaits for an understated, richly talented songwriter. Reid is currently crowd-funding her full debut album; we trust her Samaritan spirit will attract a host of patrons. Lend an ear, as she does so generously; the train is arriving at a platform near you.
If You Know Me: Charm Of Finches
The charming new album by Australian sisters Charm Of Finches may have been recorded in a snow-bound forest in Nova Scotia but it exudes a fireside warmth. Our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com is the lovely If You Know Me, a collaboration with Sam Bentley of The Paper Kites. Harmonies to melt the hardest heart.
Marlinchen In The Snow, the fourth album by Melbourne sisters Mabel and Ivy Windred-Wornes and their first since 2021’s acclaimed Wonderful Oblivion, was inspired by the frozen beauty of the landscape in which it was created. With Canadian producer Daniel Ledwell at the helm, the alt-folk duo reflect on their transient life on the road, the idea of home and belonging, and the fragility of relationships.
The sisters quip about If You Know Me: ‘The song is about navigating communication in the initial stages of a relationship and having a resting bitch face, haha, how someone’s facial reactions aren’t necessarily who they are inside. When we were recording we felt it needed something extra and so we cheekily asked Sam if he might jump on it in some capacity. He came back with an incredible second verse which completed it perfectly.’
Mabel and Ivy, both multi-instrumentalists like their producer, have that uncanny synchronicity as vocalists, seemingly the precious gift of siblings. Their lyrics can be mischievous and melancholic and dark but always bewitching. Their month in Canada with a frozen lake on their cabin doorstep, following five months of touring across Australia, the UK and Europe, was richly rewarding.
If You Know Me has an alluring melody and finely crafted lyric…
No one will ever know all the secrets that hide behind my frown
You think I’m cold as the winter, warm as the sun when it’s down
The second verse is sung by their guest, fellow Melburnian Bentley, whose tender tone dovetails snugly with the sisters’ celestial voices.
And I know I can be misleading when I don’t give you what you’re needing
Like a light in the evening, rain on a summer’s day
Appearing too keen can be misinterpreted. With the attractive chorus, we are getting warmer…
But if you know me
You know that I like to talk
That I like to read your thoughts
And I’ll hold you if that’s what you want from me tonight
Ivy’s violin and Mabel’s cello are elegantly prominent here before all three vocalists join in the most poetic verse…
And I know I can be a downer, a pessimistic, killjoy, frowner
But I wanna be around you, know that I do
And I’ll say what I wanna say even if it’s not what you wanna hear today
And I’m sorry for your dismay
The fairytale winter landscape of the recording location was inspirational, especially as far as the title track is concerned. The haunting Marlinchen In The Snow turns the pages of a gruesome Brothers Grimm tale the sisters recall from childhood, The Juniper Tree. The character Marlinchen buries the bones of her dead brother, decapitated by her stepmother, beneath the same tree where her mother lies and he is transformed into a bird singing the truth of his demise.
A modern murder ballad? ‘We feel it’s a story of female strength, battling oppressive obstacles and rising above them to pave a way led by your inner voice. These themes inhabit a lot of the songs on the album and in a sense encapsulate what it’s been like for us as artists.’
The dreamy, piano-led Atlantis is riddled with doubt about the depth of a relationship: ‘Shimmering walls and scaly skin/ The cold has a way of creeping in/ Voiceless mouths, unseeing eyes/ No one hears your cries in the city of disguise.’ That inner voice again, and those inescapable echoes of First Aid Kit.
Beyond the pop playfulness of Clean Cut and Middle Of Your Mess, two intoxicating tracks examine the paradox of longing for travel and pining for home. Leave It All Behind and Temporary Home were both written far from the nest. When their manager described touring as ‘just a long a long series of goodbyes’, the songwriters hurriedly noted the line.
‘Coming from searing hot Australia to the icy depths of Canada gave us a perfect framework to play with images and feelings to express the polarities of adventure and homeliness.’
Adventurous and homely: the music of Charm Of Finches in a nutshell.
Free Treasure: Adrianne Lenker
Adianne Lenker’s sixth solo album Bright Future sounds almost like a practice session, a bootleg of first or second take demos that recalls the looseness of the Basement Tapes. But spontaneity is its strength, befitting the Big Thief singer’s glorious songwriting. Our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com is Free Treasure, an indie folk jewel.
Big Thief were formed in Brooklyn but they’ve always felt more at home in a rural location. It’s the same with her new collaborators. Lenker gathered co-producer Philip Weinrobe and musicians Mat Davidson, Nick Hakim, Josefin Runsteen and her brother Noah to play piano, guitar, fiddle and percussion at the Double Infinity studio in New England in the autumn of 2022. As Mojo put it, their music is ‘as pure as an upstate creek, their commune vibe generating an old-school, vegetable-dyed-in-the-wool hippy aura’.
Welcome to the Woodland Tapes. Lenker’s melodic and lyrical gifts flourish in such an intimate, bucolic setting. The front porch has moved indoors. Away from her main band she prefers minimalism. Free Treasure, a co-write with Jim Krivchenia, is cosmic poetry, a large doffed country hat to Gillian Welch and the McGarrigles. Her voice, so fragile and vulnerable it might shatter at any point, is achingly beautiful. Weinrobe describes her singing as ‘so honest and so true’ . ‘She’s willing to go to the edges of her skill without fear or embarrassment.’
Stove light glows like a fire
We’re sitting on the kitchen floor
Just when I thought I couldn’t feel more
I feel a little more
I feel a little more
Understanding
Patience and pleasure
Time and attention
Love without measure
Love without measure
Bright Future, an ironic title if ever there was one, was cut straight to tape, the playing and production polished but unvarnished, those little imperfections contributing to the down-home feel. We are in the room with them. The 32-year-old Indianapolis-born Lenker’s songs explore romance and heartbreak from different perspectives amid life’s impermanence, the search for emotional truth and her belief that we are destroying the planet.
Lenker and Davidson, aka alt-country artist Twain, performed a lovely version of Free Treasure on the Jimmy Fallon Show. The track is an appreciation of the gifts of nature and the little things in life and in a relationship, the seemingly humdrum.
There’s a guy on the nape of my neck
And he hangs out there all day
He quantifies my every thought
And tells me not to play
He tells me not to play
We lay around for hours
Talk about childhood pain
Mom and dad and past lives too
I can tell you anything
I can say anything
Lenker’s complicated, unconventional back story helps to explain the disarming honesty of her songs. She was born into a spiritual commune before travelling round in a van with her nomadic musical parents, who later divorced. Her music became a calling amid the turbulence: ‘It was this thing that was always there for me that I could pour my heart into safely.’ She began playing guitar at six and wrote her first song at eight. Her father took her to open mic nights when she was 12; her first album followed at 13 and dad managed her career until she broke away.
To a bright future. Sadness As A Gift, which could be the wording on Lenker’s badge of honour, is as poignant as Free Treasure. More unbearably so. Runsteen’s violin and Davidson’s harmonies build around Lenker’s strummed acoustic in a lament to a relationship that will never quite end (‘Chance has shut her shining eyes/ And turned her face away’).
‘I still like looking at the world around me with softness and an open heart,’ she told the New York Times. ‘To live in this life is to be burdened by the heaviness of whatever existence is. I feel that burden through each person I know – it’s like a loop. If you can really allow yourself to feel it, your sadness doesn’t have to be so scary. You wouldn’t feel it if you didn’t have this immense care – and so you can see your own love through the lens of the sadness, which is a beautiful thing.’
Lenker’s two last solo records, Songs and Instrumentals, released in tandem in 2020, were recorded in the early days of lockdown, a period she spent grieving for the world and her own world. On Bright Future she opted for a more relaxed regime. ‘Quiet can also be powerful and intense – when I’m just sitting and playing, I like that feeling of not having to push at all. And I really wanted to push into the naturalness of not pushing.’
Other standouts? Real House, a collection of profound childhood memories propelled by Hakim’s deliberately discordant piano; the charming, harmony-rich No Machine; the exuberant, recast Big Thief favourite Vampire Empire notable for Lenker’s Dylanesque delivery; and the desolate heartache of piano ballad Ruined, the oldest song of the set. On Real House, a paean to lost innocence and so-called because she never had one, Lenker sings: ‘When I was seven, I saw the first film that made me scared/ And I thought of this whole world ending/ I thought of dying unprepared.’
She is still having nightmares about ecological disaster, as in the mischievous wordplay of Donut Seam (‘This whole world is dying/ Don’t it seem like a good time for swimming/ Before all the water disappears?’). But as long as there’s time she still has pure love and fractured love to write about. Music to treasure.
America, Come: Aoife O’Donovan
Irish American songwriter Aoife O’Donovan’s remarkable tribute to the empowerment of women through the suffragette movement, All My Friends, provides our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com. The stirring America, Come revisits the words of activist Carrie Chapman Catt to reflect on ‘what has changed – and what hasn’t – for American women in 100 years since gaining the right to vote’.
Inspired by two commissions to write music to commemorate the anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which enshrined women’s right to vote, for the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra and the Massachusetts FreshGrass Foundation, O’Donovan researched the speeches and letters of suffragette Chapman Catt, founder of the League of Women Voters in 1920.
As the Boston-born, Brooklyn-based musician says: ‘Woman has fought bravely, and hard, so damn hard, for her place in American society. And now, in 2024, she is watching her work crumble.’ America, Come implores us to commit to democracy values which many believe have been eroded in recent times. The chorus of this swirling, atmospheric track echoes a century-old address by Chapman Catt…
What is the democracy for which the world is battling
For which we offer up our man power,
Woman power, money power, our all?
Her fourth solo album was produced by O’Donovan, her husband Eric Jacobsen and Darren Schneider and features a lustrous supporting cast: Sierra Hull on mandolin, Noam Pikelny on banjo, New York chamber orchestra The Knights, brass quartet The Westerlies and The San Francisco Girls Chorus. The more we hear those synchronised, anthemic voices, the more we are convinced this soundtrack could transfer to the Broadway stage. All we need is a script.
America, Come is propelled by the electric bass of Alan Hampton and Dawes drummer Griffin Goldsmith. With a nod to Leonard Cohen’s Democracy, it references Lady Liberty, the ironic symbol of a democracy in which women were denied a voice, never mind a vote. ‘It’s disappointing that we’re still facing so many of the same inequalities,’ O’Donovan told The Colorado Sound. ‘There’s a part where she implores ageing senators to step aside to make room for new blood and new ideas, and it’s almost hilarious to think this is still happening today.’
Some of you are old, I know
Are you willing that those who take your place
Might blame you for not keeping pace?
Is there any gain for you, or gain for the nation to delay?
Don’t drive us away, don’t wait...
The title track was the first single to be unveiled, released on Chapman Catt’s birthday to mark the movement’s 1920 crusade to persuade Tennessee to become the final signatory and make the proposed amendment law. ‘The seeds of this song predate the entire project,’ explains the Crooked Still and I’m With Her artist. ‘All My Friends is about camaraderie, companionship, people united in the common struggle against oppression. I imagine the women literally marching in Tennessee as the dawn lifted over the fields. I imagine the struggle of needing just one more state to ratify, and just how much weight that final vote held. I imagine the collective longing for the country of our birth to open her arms.’
Over The Finish Line recalls O’Donovan’s previous release The Age Of Apathy, which stresses the importance of commitment – complacency must be resisted. It features the divine harmonies of Anaïs Mitchell, the songwriter behind the hit musical Hadestown, based on Greek mythology, and the perfect collaborator for that aforementioned Broadway project if she can ever summon the energy again.
Like the track simply called Daughters, the gorgeous Someone To Follow was written for her daughter as O’Donovan imagines what hopes and expectations the mother of Chapman Catt might have had for her in the 1800s. ‘These bold and brave women from a different time, who were their mothers? And what were they thinking? It was scary to be a powerful woman in those days. I really did start writing with that in mind. Those are words that I think every parents can relate to. You want your children to be leaders, to be the ones who are fighting the good fight.’
The majestic Crisis is named after a Chapman Catt speech. ‘I couldn’t help but feel that it could be written and delivered today,’ says O’Donovan. With its jazz inflections and glorious brass and string arrangements, we hear strains of another mighty Mitchell, Joni. ‘Wow, how was this written in 1916. This is insane.’ As O’Donovan sings, the boulder is gathering speed.
Oh America, look up, the star is getting nearer
It’s time to shout aloud to everybody who can hear us
The woman’s hour has struck
The woman’s hour is now
The woman’s hour is here
O’Donovan has accustomed us to ambitious projects, last year reimagining Bruce Springsteen’s classic oeuvre Nebraska in its entirety. On All My Friends, after eight original songs, she treats us to ‘a kind of coda’, a rendition of Bob Dylan’s early folk ballad The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll, an inventive reworking of a tale of racist outrage that remains as relevant as it did then. Those of us who still prefer the rawness of Dylan’s stripped-back original about a black maid killed by a privileged white man who escaped with a six-month sentence cannot help but applaud O’Donovan’s determination to honour the subjugated as well as the inspirational women who came before.
Her crystalline voice has a strength that belies its delicacy. She first performed the Dylan cover during a performance with the National Symphony Orchestra on the lawn of the Capitol in 2017, a few months after Donald Trump took office. Her friend Gabriel Kahane’s stunning arrangement borrows its opening from the Battle Hymn of the Republic. She decided to include the song as an epilogue to the new album. ‘There’s a parallel story there, injustice then, injustice now, and how we react to it. The starkness in the folk melody haunts me, and though the final phase is ominous, it reminds me there is an urgency we can’t ignore.’
O’Donovan would not describe herself as a protest singer or political heavyweight but justice is a subject close to her heart. Democracy is too fragile to sit back and say nothing. She has created a beautiful homage to the women of the past who fought for a better future. Her desire for women to exercise their vote in the forthcoming presidential election is a strong undercurrent. We still await the first woman president, and women’s rights in certain states remain undermined. ‘Suffrage is coming… you know it.’ Sadly, one suspects the suffering may last a little longer.
The World Turns: John Smith
‘I’ve never felt this good about a record ever. I tend to think, I hope this is good… With The Living Kind, I know it.’ John Smith’s burgeoning band of admirers agree. Our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com is drawn from it: The World Turns. The Essex-born, Devon-raised songwriter has emerged from a dark period in his family’s fortunes to discover ‘a new way to feel’.
The album was recorded in just four days in February last year in producer Joe Henry’s remote home in Harpswell, Maine; the creative process there took six weeks with Henry – dubbed Captain by his English guest – co-writing two of the tracks (Silver Mine and Lily).
Smith relished the serenity of the location despite the sub-zero temperatures outside, feeding off a stellar cast of musicians: Henry himself and his multi-instrumentalist son Levon, superb jazz bassist Ross Gallagher, Patrick Warren on keyboards and Jay Bellerose and Joshua Van Tassel, who share drum duties.
Smith was keen to create an intimate, atmospheric record, inspired by three classic albums: Talk Talk’s Spirit Of Eden, John Martyn’s Solid Air and Joni Mitchell’s Hejira. This sequel to 2021’s highly impressive The Fray tells of a period spent rebuilding lives when the Smith family’s world turned upside down within three traumatic months at the start of the pandemic: his mother began radiotherapy for breast cancer, his father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and his wife suffered a life-challenging miscarriage.
The poignant opening track Candle (‘There are days when I find it easy and there are days I don’t find at all/ When I reach for the hands that held me and they’re waving at me as I fall’) tackles his father’s dementia, Milestones is a gorgeous ode to his young daughter, the upbeat, call-and-response title track celebrates hope itself and The World Turns, a collaboration with Iain Archer, is an optimistic love song dedicated to his wife. The theme here is healing, a turn for the better, confronting despair and remaining positive.
The couple sold their house in Sussex and relocated his parents from Spain to a new home ahead of treatment. ‘This is a song about holding tight as the world carries on, unflinching,’ he says. ‘Some days it seems that life is carrying on about its immense business and there is nothing any of us can do. I do believe that if you can find something or someone good to hold on to, it becomes almost possible to stay balanced.’
I gotta find a new way to feel
Caught in a spiral
I spin like a wheel
Pull away with me darling
To some innocent field
We’ll be stronger if we soften and yield
The world turns
And I still love you
The world turns
I won’t turn from you
As the world turns
Moving under our feet
Smith told the Americana magazine Holler:‘When I started writing these songs, I knew immediately what was happening; in the space of three years, I had essentially become a different person and had a lot more to deal with. I wrote the songs just as we were beginning to rebuild our lives. They are about changing for the better in the face of loss, celebrating the good things and facing up to the bad. Trying to keep an eye on the centre, holding on to those we love and working towards a better future.’
A consummate guitarist and soulful singer, Smith alternates between acoustic, electric and slide, picking his old Martin or pedalling his inner Martyn. That percussive style is his trademark. ‘I was singing and playing how I’ve always wanted to… and these were the songs I had always wanted to write. I do feel without my guitar and without song-writing I would have lost my mind, many times. I had finally got out of my own way. It might be the first record I’ve made that really sounds like me, and what I’m trying to do.’
We described The Fray as vaccine for the soul when we chose the hypnotic Deserving as a Song Of The Week in 2021. The World Turns offers further balm as Smith finds shelter from a personal storm. ‘Outside it’s raging and we don’t hear a sound.’ He is winning the battle.