Songs Of The Week 2025: Take 3
- Neil Morton
- 3 days ago
- 21 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Neil Morton
FEATURED SONG OF THE WEEK
Come Back And Find Me: Katie Spencer
East Yorkshire songwriter-guitarist Katie Spencer describes her latest single, Come Back And Find Me, as ‘a plea for pause and softness in a world that is becoming increasingly louder’. A welcome sentiment as the hawks outnumber the doves in these volatile times.
The intricately crafted track, our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, is the first of four singles previewing her third solo album, What Love Is, scheduled for release in October. She adds: ‘It’s a song written about this huge longing for wholeness that many of us share. I felt slightly bewildered whilst writing most of this record, and so many of the songs document that non-linear process of reaching for reassurance and sometimes finding it.
‘Creating this song in the midst of grief was a way of focusing on that inner ability to reflect, channel and comment on this collection of wild emotions that many of us experience, and trying to find some completeness and peace within that process. Many of the songs on the album explore love and how it weaves through our lives in lots of different ways. I wanted this particular song to be a mirror for human nature, and not to become an individualistic self-portrait, and I hope I have achieved that.’
She has. Her rich, relaxed vocal and accomplished acoustic guitar style inhabit a wonderful groove with Tom Mason’s double bass and producer Matt Ingram’s brushed drums before she interacts beautifully with the uplifting clarinet of Giacomo Smith. Elsewhere on the album Max Clilverd contributes pedal steel.
You know the bond that binds
Bodies and minds
And I am drowning
In heavy company and wine
Come back and find me
My darling, put the love
Back into me
I am grieving
Deep darkness descends
Come back and find me
Friends and strangers
Lovers and players, come by
With your name on their tongues
And I need to know
Where you are
My critic, my constant
You flit and you fly
In the stillness of time
Like a moth to a flame, you’re mine
Come back and find me
We spent the week immersed in the sounds of the Sixties and Seventies: Beach Boys visionary Brian Wilson’s sumptuous symphonies (God Only Knows, Good Vibrations, In My Room, You Still Believe In Me and Surf’s Up) following the sad news of his death at 82; Procol Harum and the various disputes surrounding their timeless classic A Whiter Shade Of Pale; and the extraordinary longevity of The Searchers who will be saying goodbye at Glastonbury. Then Spencer’s beguiling single landed, and we were transported back to the avant garde folk era of Pentangle and her heroes Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, John Martyn, Nick Drake and Michael Chapman.
The PR material contends that What Love Is, above all, evokes the spirit of Joni Mitchell’s finest later works, the ever innovative Spencer interpreting without imitating. It adds: ‘Lyrically mature and at times pastoral, the album is melodically sophisticated and unflinchingly honest. She moves effortlessly from wide-open jazz-tinged soundscapes, influenced by Pharos Sanders and John Abercrombie, through to the folk-baroque fingerpicking style that her fans admire her for. Her singing is powerful yet warm, true and pristine in delivery. The musicianship throughout feels liberated by Katie’s innovation and confidence, and the result is a masterclass of inspired and beautiful-sounding craftsmanship.’
Our assessment of the Joni connection will have to wait for those three further aperitifs but it is a deliciously promising start. We have become used to hearing odes to the flatland fringes of home near Hull, that sense of space reflected in her love of broad landscapes. Former Songs Of The Week have been culled from impressive earlier albums The Edge Of The Land and Weather Beaten. Now she is inviting us to engage with affairs of the heart. It might be her new pet sound.
Torus: Iona Lane
Folk singer-songwriter Iona Lane’s decision to tour the outer islands of Scotland reaped delicious fruit with her second full album Swilkie. There are so many beautiful tracks here but Torus, a captivating ode to the basking shark and our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, is the one that keeps swirling in our heads.
The Highlands-based songwriter, Lancaster-born but raised in Yorkshire, used her musical field trip to weave ecology, conservation and island folklore into poetic songs with memorable melodies. The album was conceived during three residencies on the Isle of Eigg, Isle of Mull and Sanday in Orkney, and you can almost feel the landscape and breathe the air she is lovingly singing about.
Torus, the name of the shape created by the sharks’ swimming pattern, has a strong ecological message. Lane explains: ‘The song is inspired by the history humans have had with basking sharks across the years. In a lot of folklore you read of sea serpents who were feared by sailors. It’s thought that they were actually basking sharks, floating at the surface feeding away. So the song starts with a sense of fear. Then we move to the 1900s when basking sharks were culled for the oil in their liver. Fisheries popped up all across the west coast and the sharks were wiped to near extinction.’ From monsters to rich resource. ‘Now they have made a resurgence and they’re a treasured part of our ecosystem.’
By the Isle of Soay
Build a fishery with guns
Your rich liver he knows
He can sell for a ton
He will drown you on land
Cut you up for oil and tallow
There’s a profit to be made
From the weary and sallow
I’m a giant who hunts
Torus, torus
Together we will be
Serpents in the sea
The Andy Bell-produced Swilkie, a love letter to Scotland’s islands and a clarion call for the conservation of wild spaces and marginalised communities, was recorded in a boathouse on Scotland’s west coast. If you strain hard enough to can hear the whispering of the tide.
Lane’s mother is a geologist and her love of the Highlands led to family school holiday trips. While studying folk music at Leeds Conservatoire, she was moved by the collaborative Songs Of Separation album, written in the wake of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. She told Klof Magazine: ‘I saw the band perform the album at Cambridge Folk Festival and loved the music. Knowing that it had been recorded in Eigg I went on my first solo trip to explore the island. I feel like that album gave me a lot of inspiration.’ Karine Polwart, one of 10 performers of that project, remains a powerful influence.
‘For as long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated by islands and the coastline. There’s a sense of the unknown and mystery to the sea. The shoreline is like a threshold, between two states, the land and the sea; a boundary that has been drawn by the Earth. It’s ever changing, evolving, receding, growing, just like we are as human beings; an ever present reminder that things change over time.’
From basking sharks to the buoyant Washed Up, a mythical tale of an old woman swallowed by a whale enjoying her adventure until she spies the polluted contents of its belly. The cinematic Big Skies, the title track named after a dangerous tidal current, the clever Lichen and Silent, a salute to three women lighthouse keepers, reward the listener lavishly.
Accompanying Lane’s acoustic guitar and shruti box are her co-writer on Torus and other tracks Malin Lewis (fiddle and bagpipes), Ben Nicholls (double bass and portable reed organ), drummer Signy Jakobsdottir, Louis Campbell on various guitars and banjo, Jen Austin on piano, Alex Lyon on clarinet and producer Bell on synth; the backing vocalists include Jenny Sturgeon and Josie Duncan.
Additional live tracks are available with physical formats and through Bandcamp, all recorded using a single mic in different locations, from crofts and chapels to school halls and cabins – the version of Torus comes from St Donnan’s Church on Eigg. For Lane, community and music are closely linked to ecology and landscape. With Swilkie she has created an album that celebrates the connection and invites us to recognise its importance. We should listen to the music and the message.
Adelita: Bruce Springsteen
Few of us outside Columbia Records realised just how prolific a songwriter Bruce Springsteen is. Twenty-one studio albums over six decades amount to a lot of songs. Now we can add seven more ‘lost’ albums, all to be unveiled on June 27. Our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com is the lilting Adelita, a mariachi-bathed homage to the Soldadera women freedom fighters of the Mexican Revolution.
The track will appear on Inyo, recorded in the 1990s as an intended sequel to The Ghost of Tom Joad. Instead, the 10-track LP with the California and Texas borders as its backdrop was shelved, as was the case with a further six collections, now to be released as Tracks II: The Lost Albums. Springsteen’s vaunted vault has been sprung.
Inyo, named after the diamond-shaped Californian county with Independence as its capital, is the ghost of Tom Joad we didn’t know about. Springsteen explains: ‘There was constant border reporting in the Los Angeles Times, so it was a big part of your life. Inyo was a record I wrote during long drives along the California aqueduct, up through Inyo County on my way to Yosemite or Death Valley. I was enjoying that kind of writing so much. [On the Ghost of Tom Joad Tour] I would go home to the hotel room at night and continue to write in that style because I thought I was going to follow up with a similar record, but I didn’t. That’s where Inyo came from. It’s one of my favourites.’
If Adelita is any guide, it will become one of our favourites too. We are told that several songs on the record, including the title track, ‘examine the Mexican diaspora, how border crossing between Mexico and the US has affected generations and the cultural losses endured as a result’. It’s a musical thread Springsteen first began to explore by covering Ry Cooder’s Across The Borderline on his 1988 Tunnel of Love Express tour.
Springsteen, who undertook a series of motorcycle trips across the Southwest in the 1990s, pays tribute to the Mexican women revolutionaries who aided the country’s fight for independence. Adelita is a nine-verse love song wrapped in a battlefield scene, its heroine doomed to a bloody end…
In the High Sierras, camped were the soldiers
And a young soldada who valiantly fought
Side by side with Francisco Villa
Adelita
Far from my home now, a Texacan soldier
It’s not for fortune or risk to the battlefield I fight
I fell in love with Adelita with my very soul
We’ll stand in arms this night
She said, ‘Johnny, if I should die in battle
And my body be left in the Sierranea
My love, my love, in God’s name
Fight on, and remember me
That my blood will not have been spilled in vain’
The tender vocal negotiates impending tragedy…
Tonight, I lay in the mountains with the campesiños
My mind at peace from the vows I’ve made
I know I’ll never see Texas again
Your portrait I carry deep in my breast pocket
My rifle firing into the campaña
I ride with you ’round my heart
Protected from this death by beauty
The song draws inspiration from the traditional corrido ballad La Adelita, inspired by Adela Velarde Pérez, a Chihuahuense woman who joined the Maderista movement in the early stages of the revolution and fell in love with Madero. She became a popular icon and a symbol of the role of women, sometimes as fighters against federal government forces, in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920.
The track notes credit a non-lyric author: María Herrera-Sobek. Her 1990 book The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis was deemed a landmark study. Challenging the stereotypical view of the passive Mexican/Chicana woman of the archetype, the author examines the portrayal of female figures in over three thousand Mexican ballads and shows that despite long-dominant patriarchal ideology, the corridos reveal the presence of self-confident women throughout Mexican history. She argues: ‘Adelita’s bravery and revolutionary spirit are lost to the fatalism and insecurities of male soldiers who are focused on passions, love and desire as they face combat.’
Though mostly recorded solo, the Ron Aniello-produced Inyo features mariachi musicians Luis and Alberto Villalobos, Angel Ramos, Humberto Manuel Flores Gutierrez, David Glukh, Jorge Espinosa and Miguel Ponce as well as Springsteen stalwart Barry Danielian.
Previous Tracks II tasters were the title track from Faithless, the score to a movie that was never made; Repo Man, from Somewhere North Of Nashville; Blind Spot, from the Streets of Philadelphia Sessions and the theme song of a movie that was made; and Rain In The River, from the Perfect World compilation. The other albums are Twilight Hours and LA Garage Sessions ’83.
The release of Tracks II has been overshadowed by Springsteen’s Land of Hope and Dreams Tour, which kicked off in Manchester, and the reaction it provoked from Donald Trump. After the 75-year-old singer had told his audience that the US is ‘currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration’, the president threatened to bar his return to the US and launch an investigation into him and other musicians who endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential campaign.
Not all fans appreciated the concert tirade, preferring music to rhetoric, but artists have crowded into Springsteen’s corner. Bono, the U2 frontman, when asked by TV presenter Jimmy Kimmel whose side he was on, said: ‘There’s only one Boss in America.’ He joked that Trump’s Truth Social platform ‘seems to be pretty anti-social’ and is ‘not very true a lot of the time’.
The president may not care for the symbolism of Adelita, Soldaderas, Mexicans, woke critics, aliens or left-leaning songwriters. Not even one born in the USA.
The Swell Season: Stuck In Reverse
It has been 16 years since we last swayed to the captivating sound of The Swell Season. Now we can relish the welcome reunion of Irish troubadour Glen Hansard and Czech-born pianist Markéta Irglová, and specifically their moving ballad Stuck In Reverse, our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com.
The song title may suggest that the Oscar-winning duo are living in the past. There is plenty of nostalgia and reflection here but since re-forming they are intent on looking to the future with a third album, aptly named Forward, due out on June 13.
The Swell Season are so-called after Hansard’s favourite novel by humanist Czech author Josef Škvorecký. Their eponymous debut album, released in 2006, was followed three years later by Strict Joy. Irglová and Hansard came to prominence after starring in the 2007 film Once and winning the Academy Award for Best Original Song with their composition Falling Slowly.
The new eight-song collection was produced by Irglová’s husband Sturla Mio Thorisson and recorded in their Masterkey studios in Reykjavik alongside new recruit Piero Perelli on percussion and original band musicians Marja Gaynor (violin and viola) and Bertrand Galen (cello) and Joseph Doyle on bass. Irglová says: ‘It felt right to title the record Forward because it’s a reunion of sorts, but we’re not going backwards. Both of us have grown and changed; we’re in different places and getting to know each other again as the new people we’ve become.’
Dubliner Hansard says of Stuck In Reverse: ‘In any situation of letting go, moving on is clearly the right and natural thing to do. This song speaks to that part of us that can’t quite get there. The moment just before complete acceptance.’ What might have been a song of regret about the end of a relationship becomes a soulful celebration.
The track has a Burt Bacharach or Jimmy Webb vibe. Hansard had singers such as the Chiffons or the Ronettes in mind while searching for a timeless sound but he was stuck in the verse, as it were. It was Irglová who provided the gear shift (So go…) to complete the melody. The chorus is glorious, their two voices – one raspy, the other delicate – interweaving wonderfully.
So go, there’s a world of changes
So many bridges still to get over
Rubicons still to cross
And I’ll be picking up the pieces
Long after you left them and long after you’re gone
I know there’s no getting over this, try as I must
I drink to forget, it only makes it worse
Can we go backwards
Back to the days before the wheels came off
I know there’s no going back now
I tried to move on, but I’m stuck in reverse
‘We serve as a mirror to each other, like playing catch; it’s so interactive, like sparks hitting off each other,’ says Irglová. ‘It’s almost like alchemy; we pass this through the sieve of our experiences and who we are as people. I really respect Glen as an artist and a writer and I love writing and performing with him.’
Hansard, best known as the frontman of Irish rock band The Frames, and Irglová performed their own songs in Once. The movie, in which they played struggling musicians in Dublin, thrust them into the glare and was adapted into a Tony-winning Broadway play. In 2022 the long-time friends, who had ended their romantic relationship in 2009, decided amid their respective solo careers and film soundtrack work to reconvene for a series of shows, which led to a larger run of dates in 2023 and a recording session. A joyous duet, The Answer Is Yes, composed as Hansard was about to marry the Finnish poet Maire Saaritsa, encouraged the pair to meet again in Irglová’s Iceland studio to write a new album last year. The only way was forward.
‘After the whirlwind that led up to the Oscars and beyond, we were so busy and with that came a pressure that neither of us particularly wanted, and ultimately we kind of drifted in the middle of all of that hard work and celebration,’ says Hansard. ‘We remained good friends, helping on each other’s records, keeping up with each other’s families. While touring my last record, I realised I just missed her. I remember calling Markéta and saying, ‘Do you feel like doing some gigs?’ She said: ‘Yeah, that sounds great,’ and the shows went really well. Suddenly we found ourselves making a record. We were both totally into it and so here we are, a new chapter of our lives.’
Since the success of Once, Irglová has released three studio albums; her last, Lila, included My Roots Go Deep and Girl From A Movie. Hansard has put out five studio albums, the most recent one All That Was East Is West Of Me Now in 2023, a year after Take Heart, a single about his time spent with Ukrainian refugees in Ireland following the Russian invasion. Earlier in 2022 he toured as part of Eddie Vedder’s Earthlings band. In December 2023, Hansard performed a stirring rendition of Fairytale Of New York alongside Lisa O’Neill and The Pogues at Shane MacGowan’s funeral service.
The Frames have six albums to their name and supported Bob Dylan on tour in Australia and New Zealand in 2007. Dylan, Van Morrison and Leonard Cohen (‘the holy trinity’) have been major influences for Hansard. So has Irglová.
We’ve been served two other album tasters: the gorgeous People We Used To Be (‘I will not stand by and watch this fire/ Burn down everything we worked so hard to build/ If you keep willing those flames to go higher/ You know they will’) and Factory Street Bells, written as a celebration of the birth of Hansard’s son and a riposte to a literary critic’s assertion that ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’. Critics can also be stuck in reverse.
Bonnet Of Pins: Matt Berninger
The most enduring songs have an air of mystery, the writer preferring to leave interpretation to the listener. Matt Berninger’s single Bonnet Of Pins, our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, kicks off the guessing game with the title itself before intriguing images weave in and out of an indie rock groove fit for a festival.
The track will appear on Berninger’s second solo album Get Sunk, due out on May 30. Get Sunk refers to a low point during the depths of the pandemic when the songwriter suffered ‘a long period of writer’s block, creative paralysis and self-disgust’. Then the frontman of The National toured for two and a half years before regaining his mojo to create a follow-up to 2020’s Serpentine Prison. You can sense a reawakening of artistic freedom amid the bittersweet nostalgia.
Berninger sings of an awkward, disturbing reunion with an old flame, reigniting memories of a turbulent relationship. He loves his ‘blurry portraits of an emotional state’ and the subject of his pain here is a haunting presence throughout.
She sidewinders through the room to me
With a real cigarette and a Styrofoam coffee
She’s still wearing her father’s feather jacket…
She says she takes photos of tractor bones
And sells ’em to model luxury homes
The closest thing she’s ever found to love
Is the kind you can’t get rid of fast enough
Berninger says the title was inspired by a visit to an exhibition of Amish artefacts which included an actual bonnet with long pins inserted. The Amish connection ended there but it was too good a phrase to overlook. Is this a play on crown of thorns, we wonder, although it is the narrator who is suffering. The woman’s words in the chorus, a clever device, are echoed by Julia Laws, aka Ronboy.
She finishes off my drink and
Puts on a bonnet of pins and
Says ‘I thought I’d find you much quicker than this
You must’ve thought I didn’t exist,
Poor you, I do
We’d better go before your boyfriends cry’
The Cincinnati-born son of an artist delivers the verses in his distinctive melancholic baritone, half spoken, before reaching exasperation point in the bridge with its Lolita reference (Nabokov cocktail) as the song builds in thrilling intensity with strings and horns and a guitar coda from producer and co-writer Sean O’Brien.
Forget the questionnaires and the oral histories
I don’t care how many times you almost said you missed me
It’s a cup trick shell, and it’s a puff of smoke
And it gets me every time, it’s a pretty good joke
Defiant to the last…
I know that you miss me, I know that you miss me
This stuff takes a lifetime
It has been some lifetime, mostly on National service, for the 54-year-old graphic designer turned singer who also formed the EL VY project with Brent Knopf of Ramona Falls and Menomena (check out Return To The Moon). There have been collaborations with Taylor Swift (The Alcott and Coney Island, co-written by The National’s Aaron Dessner), Rosanne Cash (Crumble), Booker T Jones, Phoebe Bridgers, Hannah Georgas, Adia Victoria and Hand Habits (Meg Duffy). His wife Carin Besser, a poet and one-time fiction editor for The New Yorker, has contributed lyrics to The National’s songs (Brainy and Ada on the album Boxer, for example) as well as backing vocals. His brother Tom directed Mistaken For Strangers, a film about The National.
One would expect bons mots such as Nabokov cocktail, tractor bones, father’s feather jacket and bonnet of pins to be scribbled in notepads or typed in phone memos as potential for metaphors. But Berninger reveals in a YouTube conversation with fashion designer Todd Snyder, whose gear The National wear on tour, that he writes odd thoughts and epithets on baseballs with a marker pen; hundreds of them are in a basket at his side so he can access them more easily than the multitude of notebooks on his shelves.
The lyricist describes the baseball inscriptions as ‘a collage of fragments, the unedited beginnings of a song’. He tosses a ball in the air, remarking that the unseen words on it have not yet been used. Every completed song must feel like a home run.
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.
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.