Songs Of The Week 2025: Take 3

FEATURED SONG OF THE WEEK

A Hundred Years Ago: Christina Alden and Alex Patterson

Birth trauma is a subject you don’t read about every day, least of all sing about. But there’s admirable strength in the delicacy of the latest offering from Norfolk folk duo Christina Alden and Alex Patterson. A Hundred Years Ago, our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, is a gentle gem from their second album, Safe Travels.

Alden describes it as ‘a farewell to the pieces of yourself you leave behind and the power of the human body under duress’. The song was born not long after their daughter Etta arrived in 2022. Alden explains: ‘As storm Eunice battered the windows and the world outside, I was struck with severe pregnancy-induced hypertension and spent the time plugged into machines with multiple cannulas pinned to my every limb. It was both extremely tough and beautiful.’

The song itself is as beautiful, Alden’s affecting vocal enhanced by her partner’s hushed harmony and subdued fiddle...

In the quiet of the morning you came to me

In the wake of a February storm

The light of the day came creeping in

When the wind blew you in from the cold

‘We emerged almost a week later in the wake of the storm as news broke of Russia crossing the border into Ukraine. It felt like such an uncertain time to be bringing a child into the world. This is a song about those momentous events that happen throughout life, the ones that leave their mark, shifting the earth beneath your feet and changing things forever.’

Alden told Here Comes The Song that the title was inspired by ‘the feeling I had when first meeting Etta, as if I had always known her and thinking about all those generations of motherhood that had come before’. Their sound is contemporary but the past is always present.

The seas will rise to meet you

Land will lay before you

And I was made to love you

A hundred years ago

In the quiet of the morning you came to me

In the dark of these hospital walls

And I left a piece of myself back there

Wrapped up in the needles and wires

Safe Travels is a deeply personal collection of songs that explores the couple’s journey into parenthood and the importance of home and the relationships that bind us across the generations. Inspired by the world around them, they have a keen environmental eye to craft stories with the natural world at its heart as well as an affinity with old crafts and conventions.

We were already familiar with the pre-released tracks: the gorgeous Etta’s Song (a former Song Of The Week here), The Starless Sea (influenced by Erin Morgenstern’s novel of the same name), the buoyant title track and Our House, which celebrates growing up in a musical household. Winter Song, a love letter to the changing seasons, is as snug as a blanket in the cold, and Shallow Water with its evocative squeaking strings recalls the East Anglian tradition of fen skating when flooded meadows become natural ice rinks (farmers, we are told, used to make skates out of animal bones).

The Old Weather Station, about an abandoned village on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean now inhabited by polar bears, is a composition as magical as the Dmitry Kokh photographs of the animals’ unlikely home that inspired it. The overcoming spirit of nature to survive is a passion of these multi-instrumentalists.

I know these hills like the back of my hand

Where the wandering mist lays claim to this land

On rocky shores I’ll take what I can

In this house on the hill

I don’t know where I am bound

Between the ice and this melting ground

No one knows where I will be found

But the wind carries me on

Here comes a storm on the back of the tide

The wind and the rain follow behind

And blue is the sea so deep and so wide

Held in the arms of a dark winter’s sky

The album was recorded and produced by Patterson in The Folk Cellar at their Norwich home. John Parker’s subtle double bass is again a welcome accompaniment to Christina’s guitars and banjo and Alex’s fiddle, viola, tenor guitar and Shruti. Trombone and flugelhorn are provided by Phil Cambridge. The couple point out that keen listeners may hear strains of their home life – ‘our old cat pottering and meowing around the house, our daughter talking in the background or the sound of city life just beyond the studio walls’.

We feel safe in the assumption that their musical travels and engaging sound will be appreciated far beyond those walls. Preferably in an intimate setting.

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Standing On The Fault Line: I’m With Her

The sense of anticipation for the second album by US roots trio I’m With Her is heightening. Like the swell of their spine-tingling harmonies. They have released the third single from Wild And Clear And Blue and it could be their finest song yet. Standing On The Fault Line, our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, is an early contender for track of the year.

Standing On The Fault Line took root in the Echo Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles as a meditation on the impact of climate change and financial instability of living in the city, but turned into a metaphor, the question of when it’s time to give up on a dream – while stressing that both staying or going is an equally courageous choice. It opens with gently picked acoustic guitars by Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan before Sara Watkins’ stirring vocal.

Is it when the reservoir dries out

And the birds stop flying south

How we gonna know it’s time to flee?

If we wait for a rainy day

When the opening sky just seems to say ‘stay’

We’ll never leave

‘Fault Line came from thinking about Los Angeles as a very transient place where many people feel a tension between whether to stick it out and stay or pack up and move on,’ says Watkins, co-founder of bluegrass combo Nickel Creek. ‘Even if you’ve never been to LA, I think a lot of people have had the experience of giving up on a dream and needing to pivot to something else.’

The song was obviously written before those terrifying wildfires swept through California in January but such a calamity lends more relevance to the lyric.

Derived from a melody introduced by O’Donovan, Standing On The Fault Line evolved into a slow-burner that achieves a certain majesty in the chorus and especially at the bridge, when the threesome’s harmonies synchronise wonderfully. Faultless.

Standing on the fault line

Waiting for the ground to crack

Just put one foot in front of the other

Don’t look back

‘Initially we considered having me sing alone on the bridge, but it made the song feel so much smaller,’ says Watkins. ‘Once Aoife and Sarah took that section, it created this feeling of being supported by friends or ancestors or internal voices of encouragement – it’s like we subconsciously arranged the song in a way that aligns with all the lyrical themes of the album.’

Wise old tree sends her roots down deep

Drinkin’ up water for her soul to keep on standing

The crust of the earth untouched by light

For centuries the highway signs were fading

Doubling down in the dusty soil

Where the colonies of life unspoiled go on living

Watkins, admired as much for her fiddle playing as her singing, delivers an impassioned vocal performance here. Our favourite lines?

You only need a map when you’re a stranger in the land

But I know this place like the back of my hand

Been here since I was a child...

Cottonwood pile’s been petrified

Everything buried in the landslide remaining

Oh what a sweet discovery

And a wise old woman you might be tomorrow

We make no apologies for choosing another Song Of The Week from the imminent album following the beautiful Ancient Light. The bluegrass-ingrained Find My Way to You, inspired in part by a live cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Open All Night by Jarosz and O’Donovan, was the other pre-released track. Wild And Clear And Blue was produced by Bonny Light Horseman’s Josh Kaufman and recorded in New York state, at The Outlier Inn in the Catskills and The Clubhouse in Rhinebeck.

Songwriting credits for all 11 tracks are shared. Says O’Donovan: ‘When we write together it’s almost like we’re a three-headed creature – there’s never any need to take ownership of ideas, and always an ease of letting go when something isn’t working.’ Such is their chemistry and generosity of spirit.

As we remarked earlier, the joyous sound of this occasional collaboration, each musician steeped in a deep respect for the folk tradition and a passion for expanding its horizons, makes you yearn for a more permanent arrangement. Their devotees at the London show on May 29 will agree. We’ll be there, with her and her and her.

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