Songs Of The Week 2025: Take 3

FEATURED SONG OF THE WEEK

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.

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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.

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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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