Songs Of The Week 2025: Take 4

Neil Morton 

FEATURED SONG OF THE WEEK

Lonely Avenue: Jon Batiste (featuring Randy Newman)

The opportunity to honour two heroes with one song was too inviting to miss for jazz-blues artist Jon Batiste. The late Ray Charles first recorded Lonely Avenue in 1956 and it is covered by Batiste on his new album, Big Money, in the company of a living legend, Randy Newman. The wonderfully soulful duet is our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com.

‘Randy hadn’t been singing or recording,’ Batiste told Variety magazine. ‘I was very honoured our friendship inspired him to get back into it. Our musical connection is very special, which could make for a classic album, perhaps, someday. For now it’s just more fun to keep serenading the living room.’

The living room is Newman’s. And so is the piano. The duet was captured there in one take. The song opens with Newman singing solo, accompanying himself on piano. Batiste takes over the melody before Newman’s unmistakable tenor rejoins for the chorus. Finally, Batiste commands the keys and the two voices weave in and out of each other. The evocative video, showing Batiste being wooed by Newman’s pied piper promptings along the hallways of a seemingly abandoned apartment, was directed by David Henry Gerson.

Now my room has got two windows

But the sun never comes shinin’ through

You know it’s always dark

It’s dreary since I broke it off with you

I live on a lonely avenue

The tempo is slower than the Charles original; the vibe is after-hours blues-jazz joint; the piano playing by both men is as affecting as the singing. ‘Ray is my patron saint,’ said Batiste. ‘Just as the Big Money songs are in conversation with each other, I’m in conversation with Randy and Ray. I’m just grateful we have this song, this video and this beautiful life. The world can now hear this 12-bar blues ode to Ray Charles – and hopefully we can put a dent in the loneliness epidemic that our country is facing today.’ A 12-bar with the bar raised high.

Understandably, the 81-year-old Newman bears signs of the health issues that have kept him out of the limelight since 2022. He had to cancel planned European tour dates following surgery for serious back issues. He did return to sing his classics I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today and Political Science on Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney in Los Angeles in April. The Pixar and other movie soundtracks have been frequent although his last solo album of original material was Dark Matter, and even darker wit, in 2017. We wonder if Putin has heard Putin.

The Lonely Avenue collaboration is described as having ‘emerged organically during a conversation between Batiste and Newman about life, music and family. With a handheld recorder running, the two sat at the piano and created something intimate, spontaneous, and entirely unfiltered’.

Now my covers feel like lead now

And my pillow feels like stone

Well, I’ve tossed and turned so every night

I’m not used to being alone

I live on a lonely avenue

I could cry, I could cry, I could cry

I Could die, I could die, I could die

It sounds like I’m dying

We referred to two heroes but it’s three if you include the Brooklyn songwriter Doc Pomus. He thought the name sounded better for a blues singer than Jerry Felder. His song for Charles marked a breakthrough in terms of recognition though it made him little money. What did was his partnership with pianist Mort Shuman; their hits, written for the Drifters, Elvis, Bobby Darin, the Searchers and Dion and the Belmonts, included Save The Last Dance For Me, Sweets For My Sweet, A Teenager In Love, Little Sister, Suspicion and Surrender.

Lonely Avenue has enjoyed plenty of company down the decades, covered by the Crickets, Lee Dorsey, the Everly Brothers, Booker T & the MGs, Joe Cocker, Jimi Hendrix, the Ramsey Lewis Trio, Taj Mahal, Los Lobos, Van Morrison and Diana Krall, among others. But the Batiste-Newman reworking is a cut above.

This is the only cover on Batiste’s album; the rest is clever wordplay and fine musicianship made more intimate by the stripped-down arrangements. The Oscar-winning former band leader for Late Night With Stephen Colbert largely parks his jazz voice on Big Money and treats us to the soul, blues and New Orleans side of his musical tastes. The nine-track set was recorded in a week, with many tunes laid down in one take.

The opening track Lean on My Love, whose video was filmed at Victory Bible Church in Altadena, California, where the wildfires devastated that community, showcases Andra Day as a vocal partner. The title track highlights the Womack Sisters, Sam Cooke’s granddaughters. Petrichor is a slick southern-style ode to the planet. Maybe, a Newmanesque piano ballad, just may be the best of his solo pieces.

Batiste’s last album, Beethoven Blues, was an instrumental offering that topped the classical charts for nine weeks. But we prefer the songs, especially when Randy Newman is invited to join in a magical serenade. They should call it Joy Story.

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Billionaire: Kathleen Edwards

If Kathleen Edwards had not turned her back on the music industry and opened a coffee shop, we might never have heard her finest love song. Billionaire, our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, is not about a Wall Street fat cat, it relates to the wealth of affection the Canadian songwriter still holds for the departed friend who helped her run that business.

Billionaire is the impassioned title track of Edwards’ latest album and features a refrain that begs to be sung loud and long...

If this feeling

Were currency

I would be

A billionaire

Edwards told NPR Music: ‘I wrote it for my beautiful friend, Amanda – she was the most living and optimistic person. She came into the coffee shop as a customer, and she ended up running the place. And losing her reminded me that life is really just about having great people around you and wanting to tell them that they are – they’re a gift to you. She was very dear to me, she was very young when she passed away and still had her whole life ahead of her.’

The song, co-written by Dan Wilson, builds slowly from its Nanci Griffith-tinged opening with strummed electric guitar to the swirl of synths and Rob Moose-arranged strings…

There are a million things

That can keep a person up at night

And when I close my eyes

I go back in time when everything was fine and you’re still here

There are a million people who will never even know

That sweet look on your face when you’re bounding through the door

The secret messages that you left behind

For us to find

The poignancy intensifies to the last heart-breaking line of the closing verse…

Grief is love that makes sense

Except for those of us still left

To figure out what to do

At night with all these thoughts of you

Your perfect skin

Your smiling eyes

I can see them in my mind

How your kindness ricocheted through everyone

Edwards opened her shop just outside Ottawa in 2014; Quitters was its ironic name. Her career hiatus lasted eight years but thank goodness for the about-turn. And what a comeback, despite its pandemic timing: Total Freedom was a remarkable, widely acclaimed offering (Simple Math was a Song Of The Week here). Five years and an impressive covers album later, Billionaire – co-produced by guitar wizard Jason Isbell and Grammy-winning Gena Johnson in Nashville – should enjoy an even higher status.

Edwards’ vulnerable reimagining of his classic Traveling Alone had persuaded Isbell to take on the project and he enlisted colleagues from his 400 Unit to help thicken the sound. Keyboardist Jen Gunderman came on board too.

Her sixth album is another alt-country gem, Edwards regaining the poise of her vocal she was in danger of harming back in 2012 when she sought medical advice and burnout was a constant threat. Her unflinching honesty and sharp wit and grit in equal measure empower her nostalgic story-telling about the absurdity of life, its pain and solace.

Another favourite is the driving Say Goodbye, Tell No One, which she describes as a kiss-off song, an ode to new-found self-assurance. She explains: ‘I think the joy of playing music is such a renewed gift to me. But also, I’m no longer nervous about what people are going to think of me. Just because you have to tell somebody something that might hurt their feelings doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person. I think that’s what sometimes the record is about.’

The hardest part about the truth

Saying something that might hurt you

The hardest part about a lie

You can’t outrun it if you try

Edwards’ emotionally charged vocal and Isbell’s blazing guitar seem to channel their inner Neil Young on Say Goodbye, Tell No One. Sisters Shelby Lynne and Allison Moorer, Isbell’s fellow Alabama natives, add splendid harmonies.

Little Pink Door is a charming track, recorded live in one take, inspired by a house Edwards passes while walking her dog in her new home of St Petersburg, Florida. We trust she has fulfilled her promise to call at the property and give the owners a free copy of the album.

The scathing Need A Ride tells of small-town hypocrisy and a world of little empathy with surely a nod to draconian immigration policies: ‘I’m not going to turn away/ People who were welcome here yesterday.’ Save Your Soul concerns the more obvious meaning of billionaire, the kind we may not care for.

‘I decided to call the record Billionaire because the word is used in such a caustic way these days,’ Edwards says. ‘But we should all want to be billionaires in life, to be rich in experience, friendship, purpose and the pursuit of the things that bring us joy.’

For all her satirical bite, Edwards offers warmth and hope. Her line about kindness ricocheting through everyone is an image the world needs right now. She enriches us with her music. And she can still smell the coffee.

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Lady Liberty: Rising Appalachia

If the Statue of Liberty needed a voice, she has one now. Alabama-born sisters Leah Song and Chloe Smith, better known by their roots music project name Rising Appalachia, were determined to call out the broken promise of the United States as a safe harbour for the displaced. Their timely new single, Lady Liberty, our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, is too gentle to be angry but the uplifting message packs a quiet power.

The track imagines what America’s iconic symbol of welcome might be witnessing through those stone eyes. With a lyric inspired by the American poet Emma Lazarus’s 1883 sonnet The New Colossus, inscribed at the base of the landmark, the sisters give Lady Liberty a voice that speaks to immigrants and refugees but also to a nation polarised over the issue.

I am your lady, Liberty’s my name

I am a goddess, I hold the golden flame

Freed from shackles, stoic in the seas

I am a lighthouse

I stand for refugees

Chloe, the younger sister who sings lead on the track with Leah on high harmonies, explains: ‘This is a song about the nature of belonging and home, and the search for justice and truth. We imagined what the physical and poetic symbol of liberty may want to sing if she herself were given the chance. While we witness ongoing destruction of colonialism, genocide, climate migration, and extreme nationalism, we question what we’ve become in relation to the original promise of the United States as a refuge for liberty. This song is a reflection [by lifted lamp] on the promise and virtue of one seeking home.’

Lauded for blending Appalachian folk traditions with global roots music, Rising Appalachia have created a body of work that stirs the conscience as well as the heart. Lady Liberty should have the same effect.

I am Lady Liberty

Justice should be blind but I can see

All across the water

My sons and daughters

Here across the pond we too are witnessing divisive politics, misinformation and a lack of compassion, asylum seekers demonised and blamed for societal ills not of their making and law enforcement attacked for protecting them. As the song says:

My light should pierce the darkness

The ignorance of man

Mother of exiles, mother of outcasts I am

Huddled masses yearning to be free

Make me not a symbol of your hypocrisy

Compare those sentiments with Lazarus’s poetic lines: Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

The single follows the 10th anniversary edition of the band’s 2015 album Wider Circles, beautifully remastered. Last year Folk & Anchor, Rising Appalachia’s first covers album recorded at Asheville’s Echo Mountain Studios, reinterpreted classics by Bob Dylan (I Shall Be Released), Hozier, Beyoncé and Erykah Badu. Beyond those stirring vocals and acoustic guitars, Rising Appalachia also features David Brown (upright bass, baritone guitar), Duncan Wickel (fiddle, cello), and Biko Casini (percussion). Any introduction to the ensemble should include Harmonize (from the Leylines album of 2019) and a former Song Of The Week here, Resilient, an anthem for challenging times.

I am resilient

I trust the movement

I negate the chaos

Uplift the negative

These times are poignant

The winds have shifted

It’s all we can do

To stay uplifted

They know all about resilience. The multi-instrumentalist siblings were activists before they were full-time musicians. They grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, in an artistic household. Their father, Andrew Hunter Smith, is a sculptor and painter while their mother, Jan Smith, is a jazz pianist and Appalachian folk musician who played fiddle with the Rosin Sisters. There was even a brief family band called the Tune Smiths.

It was mum who made sure both sisters received classical and jazz piano training, guided their tutoring in vocals and harmony singing. Banjo, fiddle and guitar came later, after the sisters had left home for the mountain life of Asheville, North Carolina. Their humanitarian causes have been numerous: homeless youth education, indigenous rights, prison initiatives, mental health (Stand Like An Oak), food justice, exchanges and workshops, community projects such as the circus-like Rise Collective, always using art as a tool for social justice.

They have benefited from their ability to finance their own projects without conforming to music industry demands. Crowd-funding and Patreon have contributed. The rich palette of their genre-defying music embraces Americana, indie, gospel, world music and even the jazz, neo-soul and hip-hop they were exposed to in downtown Atlanta. The sisters’ first album, recorded in the basement studio of a friend in 2005, was so well received they launched their band Rising Appalachia, relocating to New Orleans a year after Hurricane Katrina. A cause worth busking for.

Leah shared her origin story on Instagram, at first explaining her surname change. ‘When my father began to call me Leah Song it stuck. I always knew I would make art. I painted, sculpted, studied pottery in college.⁣⁣⁣ Carved stone. ⁣⁣⁣Whittled sticks. ⁣⁣⁣I sat in the darkroom in high school developing obscure negatives through the lens of my perspective. ⁣⁣⁣I never knew music would be the path the world would take me on.

‘I knew I would be a rebel, a poet of some sort. But when I took to the road as a disenchanted 19-year-old, packed a backpack and travelled across Mexico (and then Cuba, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, India, Columbia, Italy and Ireland), I fell in love with the world again. ⁣⁣⁣I picked up the banjo in those rich years of my early 20s. Wanting solely to learn a piece of my home so that I could share it with the places that I roamed. Wanting to have the cultural vernacular to tell the story of my place of birth that was much deeper than what everyone saw on the news.’

Chloe, whose interest in natural medicine and healing inspired the song Medicine, credits their father with encouraging them to combine art with activism in a spiritual way. ‘He brought to our attention from day one: art for art’s sake is lovely, but there is something more pressing and all-encompassing about the folks who speak to the bigger picture. Our human experience, our spiritual and social need to lean on each other, find support systems and ways to rally for a higher purpose.’

Lady Liberty now has the words for her higher purpose as a torchbearer for the world: My light should pierce the darkness, the ignorance of man.

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Shadows In Shadows: High Tea (featuring Heather Maloney)

Though you can’t see me anymore

And you can’t touch me anymore

You are standing on the other side of a familial door

And I’m the shadow on the floor

With lines like these High Tea should soon be the main course. Isabella DeHerdt and Isaac Eliot, a duo from Massachusetts, have released a new single, Shadows In Shadows, from their forthcoming album, and it is a delicious slice of indie folk-rock.

Our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com features Heather Maloney on harmony vocals, their friend returning the compliment after High Tea produced and played on her recent solo offering, Exploding Star.

The High Tea website hails the duo as ‘the explosive creation of a story-spinning blues guitarist and a harmony-obsessed punk’ whose songs are ‘ripe with existential angst, weaving tales of growing up, going wild, and always coming back to the ones you love’.

Shadows In Shadows is about those loved ones, the departed ones and the importance of ancestry and friendly ghosts...

I am dust under the carpet

I am rust creeping up the wheel well

I’m a winding vine your landlord says

She needs to cut down now it’s time

I’m a pocketful of pebbles that you collected

One day when you were nine

The new album, A Small Notion, due for release on September 6, is full of big ideas, a sonically more ambitious sequel to The Wick And The Flame two years ago. Listeners are led through an inspiring personal journey, from the disoriented yearning of loss to an appreciation of the brutal realities of rough living, to tender reflections on past mistakes and an acceptance of the need for community and care.

Isabella describes the song as ‘a love letter to the shadows of my family who built the world I now get to be a part of’. She told us: ‘The song ponders the passage of time, loss, grief, and the overwhelming and overarching joy of ancestry. This song, in simple terms, is about my grandparents. Isaac and I are currently living in a house that was owned by my great grandmother, Mabel, in the early 1900s, and then inhabited my great uncle and his wife, then their adult kids, and now us.

‘There are drawings my grandfather did secretly on the attic walls, there are old love letters we’ve found in the crawl spaces, there are pictures upon pictures of family I don’t even recognise. The amount of history and family that the house and land holds is unlike anything I’ve experienced before. It led me to reflect and think more about that very thin veil between us and the people who came before us.

‘When people die, they leave these imprints (shadows, if you will), that lightly cover everything we do. I see my grandparents in every room of this house, through the old dusty windows, out in the backyard where the chicken coop used to be or where they’d park the old jalopy cars. It’s a physical manifestation of the feeling that no one is ever truly, fully gone.’

Beautifully put, as eloquent and lyrical as the slow-building track itself. DeHerdt’s vocal is alluring and her guitar work deft; producer Nate Mondschein’s drumming is dramatic and strident; and Isabella and Isaac’s harmonies, reinforced by Maloney, are a delight. We should also mention Reed Sutherland’s piano.

It’s strange, the way you creep just for an instant

Like the static on a box TV your dad would hit and say

These things aren’t made to last that long

No, they’re barely made to stay

And you quickly fade, I mean we quickly fade away

But you’ll remember sitting with him on the couch

Those stifling summer days

Shadows in shadows, we’re shadows in shadows of shadows in shadows, we’re shadows in shadows

DeHerdt is particularly indebted to Maloney whose album Exploding Star navigated the trauma of losing her beloved father. The title track was a Song Of The Week here late last year. ‘She was the first artist who really taught us how powerful it can be to openly share grief and talk about death in music. It’s a vulnerable thing to do, but brings people together in a way that not much else does.’

Isabella and Isaac met as 16-year-olds at the Berklee College of Music summer programme in Boston. ‘We’ve been friends for many a year but only started playing music together in 2020 during the pandemic. High Tea was born from a desire and necessity to keep making art during a time when we couldn’t see many people or connect with our usual collaborators. It started as a fun homegrown project as we wrote and recorded songs in my childhood bedroom, livestreaming DIY concerts, and just having fun finding our sound. Once we were able to start playing live, we travelled all over New England playing at every brewery, bar, or club that would have us. We found that we simply loved to sing together and tell stories, and started to find fans and community who connected with the tales we were spinning.’

We have had the privilege of hearing the rest of A Small Notion and would strongly recommend Bittersweet Evenings and There Goes My Old Soul. There are echoes of Boston ensemble Darlingside in the first song, a guitar-and-synth tribute to summer nights spent with friends with dreamy harmonies and a little help from Cloudbelly’s Corey Laitman.

There Goes My Old Soul provides further reflection on ancestral lineage, an appreciation of spaces that have been cared for by those who came before us. It opens to wind chimes, recorded outside Isabella’s childhood home. A lovely fingerpicked guitar enters before intimate vocals paint a picture: a cabin in the woods, animal life looking for food and shelter. Synths enter like speckled sunlight, and the luscious layers intensify. The bridge ushers in hope, the idea that sometimes the best way to find what you’re yearning for is to return to your roots.

Those shadows in shadows again. High Tea have prepared a feast. Time to tuck in.

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Is That What Love Does: Maia Sharp

If Bonnie Raitt is looking for another beautiful ballad to cover, she might consider Maia Sharp’s new single Is That What Love Does, our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com. It has the emotional ache that Raitt expresses so well and is another fine example of her fellow Californian’s eloquent writing.

Raitt and Sharp have previous. The slide guitar-playing singer recorded three of Sharp’s songs on her Souls Alike album in 2005: Crooked Crown, The Bed I Made and, most memorably, I Don’t Want Anything To Change. They performed the latter together on tour when Sharp opened the shows and discovered she might be the one best suited to interpret her own songs as well as writing for others, Brill Building-style.

The list of beneficiaries of Sharp’s skills and her writing cohorts is impressively long: The Chicks, Trisha Yearwood, Kathy Mattea, Cher, Art Garfunkel and Buddy Mondlock (Everything Waits To Be Noticed), Keb’ Mo’ and Taj Mahal, Terri Clark, Edwin McCain, David Wilcox, Lizz Wright, Lisa Loeb, Kim Richey, Mindy Smith, Madi Diaz, Garrison Starr and Paul Carrack. The only child of anthropologist Sharon Bays and Grammy-winning songwriter Randy Sharp, she was born into the music business, and has made an impressive job of it. Maia was raised in Los Angeles, studying music theory at California State University and playing at the city’s acoustic venues, but now feels at home with the creative fraternity in Nashville.

Is That What Love Does (a rhetorical question hence its lack of punctuation) is the second single from her 10th studio album Tomboy, due out on September 12, an Americana-soaked celebration of self-worth. Sharp, teaming up with Emily West, explores the end of a long-term relationship. It sounds deeply personal; one can feel the hurt, but the recovery has begun.

The blinds are off the windows

So you can see inside

Years worth of shadows

Running from the light

The shelves that held the burden

Of who I used to be

Are empty, clean and open

Making room for me

What I want to say, what I want to sing

I feel like changing everything

Is that what love does

Same house, same street, same skin, same town

Same troubled world spinning around

But nothing’s like it was

Is that what love does

Sharp’s soulful, Raitt-like tones weave in and out of Sarah Holbrook’s voilins, Eric Darken’s subtle percussion and Will Honaker’s bass, not forgetting the instruments Sharp herself contributes: guitars, keyboards, synths and soprano sax. The poetry becomes more intense:

There’s something in the making

In the breaking down of walls

I wanna rise to the occasion

Of letting them fall

Painting and peeling every shade of blue

When all it really needed was a coat of you

A coat of you. Exquisite. As for her long-standing respect for Raitt and her reputation as a blues-steeped interpreter of songs, Sharp says: ‘She is such a generous soul. Inspiring mojo swagger with humility. How does she pull that off? I’m a diehard Bonnie Raitt fan.’ They combined again last year during Raitt’s Just Like That tour; then Raitt curated a songwriting showcase at the Kennedy Center featuring Sharp and the brilliant roots artist Amythyst Kiah.

Collaboration has long been a favoured model for the 54-year-old Sharp, typified by her work with Songwriting With Soldiers, a non-profit project that pairs veterans, first responders and law enforcement with professional songwriters to create music about shared experiences. ‘The work has put me in a space that you can come back from anything. Things that I thought ranked as a problem just don’t qualify as a problem anymore in the real scheme of things.’

Such as coming out as gay at the age of 23, which brings us to the first single from the new album, the title track. The song evolved from co-writer Emily Kopp jokingly trading photos with her from their tomboy childhoods, as depicted in the nostalgic video. The honesty in this portrayal of a childhood party is refreshing and, for Sharp, life-affirming.

I’m the only girl here not wearing a dress

They’re all Audrey and Grace, I’m doing my best

People I know, they glide through the party

People I don’t know, they’re staring at me

Whispers carry, they’re trying to guess

‘Loyalty to the truth’ remains the mission of Sharp, a confessional storyteller. ‘The track is looking back on being a tomboy my whole life and, fairly recently, coming to a place where I can completely celebrate it. It feels good to own it and realise that little me was owning it too in her own way. It oscillated until I fully accepted that this is who I am, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Move on.’

Sharp’s 2021 album Mercy Rising dealt with the aftermath of a 20-year marriage; Reckless Thoughts two years later looked back at that tumultuous period from the other side after her move to Tennessee where the LGBTQ+ community seems under constant attack. The anthemic track Kind (‘My kind of people are kind people’) was particularly instructive. In an interview with Philadelphia Gay News last year, she talked of the background to the song written with Mindy Smith and Dean Fields in 2019 when Donald Trump was first in office: ‘People were unapologetic about being fundamentally unkind to other humans. Whether it was based on sexual orientation or gender identity or race or man-to-woman or colour or religion. Whatever it was, it seemed like it was sliding into this new place of acceptability.

‘How is this OK? It felt like we were getting somewhere as a society under Obama. Then it slides back to 1950. We started talking about that. Sharing our mutual disdain for that feeling about where society was heading. Then we decided to flip the script on it. How about we sing something more uplifting? About the people that we want to spend our time with, the parts of society that we respect and celebrate. Once we did that, we started having a blast.’ As the song says, a good heart is a good start.

Sharp, self-producing in her home studio, adopted an innovative approach for Tomboy, challenging percussionist Eric Darken to echo her synth sounds to achieve a different mood from that generated by the customary kick-and-snare drums. ‘He went to town. For each song he’d send me somewhere between 10 and 20 tracks named things like broom rattle, hubcap and coffee bag – it was so cool!’ The album is decorated with the talents of her inner circle: co-writers, featured artists and guest players, including her guitarist dad on two tracks.

Tomboy includes a stirring rendition of U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, with harmony vocals by Garrison Starr. ‘I always want somebody to feel the kind of connection to my music that I feel when I’m listening to music I love,’ Sharp says. ‘I just have to put my real self out there and hope that someone connects with it.’ Maybe she has found what she’s looking for. A 30-year career of writing and performing songs that chime with her peers deserves far wider endorsement. Everyone waits to be noticed.

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God’s A Different Sword: Folk Bitch Trio

Their band name was a joke that stuck but Folk Bitch Trio are a seriously impressive songwriting ensemble. Our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com is God’s A Different Sword, the Americana-bathed opening track of their debut album, Now Would Be A Good Time.

Gracie Sinclair, Jeanie Pilkington and Heide Peverelle hail from Melbourne, or Naarm as they prefer to call it, where they met at high school. Folk Bitch Trio might suggest a punkish or even subversive slant on music but their alluring indie folk-rock blends the poignant and playful, the darkly ironic and optimistic, the disturbing and soothing. The arrangements are sparing but sophisticated.

God’s A Different Sword, say the band, ‘speaks to a relinquishing pattern but indulging in the habit just one more time. The song was produced by us and Tom Healy during a fleeting stop in Auckland in the winter of 2024, while we were in town supporting Ben Howard. The lyrics are exasperated and questioning, so we wanted them to be held by instrumentation that is optimistic and open.’

Peverelle is more specific: ‘I wrote it after coming out of a long relationship, and it was this optimistic song that fell out of me and it’s grown in a different way. I think we wanted to have a song that was more optimistic.’ Messy affairs of the heart have tended to be this trio’s specialist subject.

No wonder the twentysomethings were snapped up by the Jagjaguwar label, home of Bon Iver, Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen. They trade vocals, sometimes within the same song, and have the synchronicity of siblings with wonderful Staves-like harmonies that speak volumes for their deep friendship. ‘The chemistry of being inspired by each other was evident from the get-go,’ says Sinclair.

Strummed electric and acoustic guitars announce the album before those captivating vocals take the reins, with support from Healy on bass and Chris O’Connor on drums.

If I left it just a little while

Would these questions turn to answers

In a neat little pile

Could I be good on my own accord?

Heaven knows I know need it

But god’s a different sword

Here I go

Just one more

Then follows the most memorable image: ‘Can’t deny it, my body keeps the score/ But if you tell me that you need it/ I can get up off my floor’. And this is not far behind: ‘Woke up early, just a rule I’ve laid/ Now my future’s written out/ On my Sunday dinner plate.’ Here she goes again.

The Aussie threesome navigate themes of sexuality, anxiety, embarrassment, delusion, love, infidelity and loss with a maturity and wisdom that belie their lack of longevity. If the songs sound lived in, it is because they were performing and touring long before their debut album was finally realised, supporting King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Alex G and Julia Jacklin. A thorough road test, with The Teskey Brothers and M Ward in the UK and US to come.

‘The other day I showed these guys a song and I got the exact same nervous feeling as when we were 17,’ Peverelle told Paste Magazine. ‘Especially with something that’s really unfinished. That’s when it’s the most nerve-racking. It’s so out in the open to pick at. But we’re there to listen and contribute. It’s a very beautiful, collaborative thing, but it’s still scary.’ Pilkington concurred: ‘More and more as I write, I can hear clearer Gracie and Heide’s voices in my head. We’re just locked in that way.’

The quality does not stop with the album opener. Moth Song is a beautifully sung ballad about unrequited love, embroidered by Anita Clark’s violin. Sinclair says it is about ‘being so spun out by everything that you feel like you’re delusional and hallucinating crazy things’. The emotional power here is spine-tingling.

Open doors and out they pour

A thousand paper bag

Coloured anti-gravity

Pieces of confetti fill my sky

I see twin birds when I think of you most times

And opals fill my eyes

I guess I wanted more from

What I saw

Hotel TV, one for the guilt-ridden, is about ‘having a sex dream about somebody else while next to your partner, and your partner being a liar’, says Pilkington. The Actor, explains Peverelle, is about ‘going to your partner’s one-woman show and then getting broken up with’. Echoes here of First Aid Kit, apart from the profanity. ‘What could you say to make this right?/ Afternoon fuck and then a fight/ You knew that I was listening/ Your new man in the kitchen.’ We love their wit and sense of fun but Folk Bitch Trio can be unnervingly honest; a grittiness not for the prudish.

The chilling Cathode Ray, says Sinclair, ‘expresses a feeling of being trapped in myself, and wanting to break out of that so violently that I’m literally talking about opening up a body viscerally. It’s about frustration, and knowing there’s no cheap thrill that’s going to fix that’. Shades of Buffalo Springfield, except for the scalpel.

Mary’s Playing The Harp, the minimalist, Laura Marling-esque closer, recounts the pain of touring with a broken heart and longing for home. The track benefits most from the recording process. The decision to record live to tape was crucial. Folk Bitch Trio had struggled to achieve their desired authentic sound digitally; now they recognised themselves. Warmth and looseness, never mind the tiny imperfections, were preferable to an over-polished product.

This is a remarkably assured introduction. Their development should be a joy to behold. If you haven’t heard Folk Bitch Trio yet, now would be a good time.

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In Your Arms: Bleach Lab

The genre has been described as shoegaze music, which is fine for those who can see their shoes from a standing position. We prefer indie rock, and they don’t come more dreamy than Bleach Lab. Our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com is In Your Arms from their latest EP, Close To The Flame.

My son, who can see his shoes, introduced me to the four-piece Buckinghamshire-formed band now based in South London and Brighton. So pleased he did. Their sound is lush, cascading and cinematic, and in lead singer Jenna Kyle they have a subdued yet ethereal presence. A sprinkling of Mazzy Star-dust.

I’d run to you

In a burning room

First time that we met

You told me

I was made just for you

The intimacy is about to be broken by a ‘but’...

Remember when we kissed that night

I could’ve died inside

And come right back to life

In your eyes

I don’t wanna forget

But I can see that it’s fading in

Your mind

The track, like the rest of their fifth EP, navigates the messy reality of holding on to love when you can sense it drifting away. The fear of loss extends to the fear of losing oneself. Bleach Lab specialise in self-doubt and the fragility, sometimes toxicity, of relationships. There is a hushed intensity about the way they build a song with shimmering guitars and subtle, Cure-like synths; there is no need for histrionics although they do admit to investing in what they call the Nirvana Chord.

The recruitment of guitarist Louis Takooree, who replaced James Wates, has added even richer textures to the understated soundscape of their acclaimed debut album of two years ago, Lost In A Rush Of Emptiness. Close To The Flame is their first self-produced project, Takooree’s technical skills enhancing those of drummer Kieran Weston. Takooree’s studio has been an asset too.

‘It’s about being stuck in relationships where you’re constantly pulled between love and pain,’ they say about In Your Arms. ‘Whether it’s wanting to be everything to someone, holding on to someone that’s slipping away, or struggling with guilt and anxiety that make it hard to move forward. Fighting for connection but feeling the weight of it all. It’s a raw journey through relationships showing how love can both lift you up and drag you down at the same time.’

Most of the introspective lyrics have been penned by Kyle and bassist Josh Longman with Takooree and Weston either kickstarting the process or transforming it. The title track (‘Write my name on your skin/ Like a wave I’ll pull you in’) and the driving Feel Something (‘I don’t feel the same today/ All your sins are mine to pay’) are other favourites here.

Kyle told Dork magazine about the former: ‘It was actually one of the last tracks we gave a title to, and we realised it summarised some of the themes of the EP quite well. Whilst they can keep you warm, if you get too close to a flame, you can be burnt, which we thought was quite symbolic of a toxic relationship, a theme throughout the record.

‘I was heavily inspired by bands like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine when writing the lyric and melody. I wanted it to feel like the end scene of a coming of age romance film, when they’re leaving everything they know in the middle of the night. It’s about an all-consuming relationship, where you’re so obsessed with someone you almost want to merge into one and become them.’

Kyle, inspired by the vivid storytelling of Elena Tonra of Daughter as well as old luminaries Joni Mitchell and Stevie Nicks, adds: ‘There are a fair few references to fire, flames and burning. It definitely wasn’t intentional but ended up being included in the EP title. Previously, we’ve had a lot of references to water, waves and drowning. I suppose you could say we’re inspired by the elements; they make for the best metaphors.’

The difference for Bleach Lab is their new-found creative control. An exciting future beckons. Shoegazing? Some of us can only dream.

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Longtime Friend: The Wildmans

A brother and sister duo from the small Blue Ridge town of Floyd, Virginia, have brought their music down from the mountains and into a new world of possibilities. The Wildmans, while never deserting their traditional bluegrass roots, are embracing alt country and indie folk more and more. Longtime Friend, the brooding title track of their second album, is our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com. The back porch can be a dark place as well as a joyous one.

Aila and Elisha Wildman were raised in a musical family, steeped in old-time tunes. Their first band was called The Blackberries with mum on bass, and they later honed their skills and songwriting talents while graduating from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Aila’s accomplished fiddle, Elisha’s guitar and mandolin and the siblings’ close-knit harmonies all bear the stamp and stomp of generations of mountain music.

It is no surprise Aila Wildman grew up idolising the voice of Bonnie Raitt. You can hear the note-bending ache in her delivery of Longtime Friend, the emotion replicated by the plaintive flourishes of her fiddle.

Longtime friend

Back again

You don’t know where you last saw them

Looking back

You might remember

What you said last you met them

You said: ‘Well, the days are dark now’

You said: ‘HelI, you can’t come back now’

The siblings told Magnet Magazine: ‘This is a song we wrote during the pandemic, referencing a past relationship – whether with a person, place or thing – that comes back to you in a new light. Something or someone haunting from your past is now seen in the present. It could be an enemy or a friend.’

Judging by the unsettling, ominous vibe, it sounds like the former…

Could it be your enemy

That you don’t see no more

Hanging round your front door?

You hold the key

I say please

Let me in and you will see

Why did you do it?

Let the longtime friend in

You’ve got your hands tied behind your back

Sitting here

All alone

It’s a cold dark day, better get home

The Wildmans’ harmonies evoke their heroes, Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, and their reworkings of Hot Burrito #2 and Luxury Liner are a fitting acknowledgement. Aila chooses a Raitt favourite, the Paul Siebel-penned Any Day Woman, in another nod to their inspirations.

‘It feels like we’ve been building up to this, taking our time and setting all the pieces in line,’ says Elisha. ‘We’ve naturally progressed under the indie-folk umbrella, but we still are doing old-time tunes, where we’ve realised it’s an important aspect of our musicianship, which ties us to our roots and how we grew up.’

We love the album opener, Take Me, and Absolute Zero but perhaps the most ambitious track is Autumn 1941 which tells the true story of a young girl targeted by the hideous eugenics and sterilisation programme during the second world war. She was rescued by her mother’s steely defiance. Her father had ‘a defect in his genes he might have handed down to me’. Where science meets fiction, said The Guardian. ‘A scientific lie had become a pillar of genocide in just 20 years.’

The duo told American Songwriter: ‘We first heard Autumn 1941 when co-writers Roger Brown, former Berklee president, and Mark Simos, Berklee songwriting professor, brought it to us. They thought we would connect to this being a part of Appalachian history not often told. The story hails from Roger’s Appalachian roots, and it was passed down through his family.

‘Different versions of this story of eugenics prove to be true across Appalachian regions and other minorities throughout American early-mid 20th century history. It immediately sparked interest. This story being so close to home, yet unlike anything we had heard before.’

I never in my whole life seen my mama

Stiffen up her spine and stand her ground

I watched her slender body start to shake

Angry as a rattlesnake

Told those men just get on back to town

I’ll never forget that autumn day

When mama chased those men away

Their close friend and fellow songwriter Dori Freeman, wife of producer Nicholas Falk and backing vocalist on five of the tracks, introduced the duo to a book she had read about the same movement in Virginia, not confined to Nazi Germany. ‘We felt we could take this song and make it our own. Once we got into the studio in Woodstock, the track just flowed and out of it came a haunting authenticity we hadn’t yet discovered in our music.’

Haunting authenticity. That phrase reflects the best of Longtime Friend.

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Waterline: Odette Michell

Odette Michell has mastered the art of of blending and blurring the ancient and modern. It is a gift, and the gifts keep coming on her regal second album The Queen Of The Lowlands. Our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com is the haunting Waterline, a breath of fresh sea air.

The Yorkshire-born, Cambridgeshire-based singer-songwriter was inspired by the ghosts of a fishing fleet, ‘the eerie photographs depicting the rusting remains of beached boats in the sand at Fleetwood on Lancashire’s Fylde Coast’.

She adds: ‘The town was once a flourishing fishing port until EU policy-makers offered the fishermen and their families cash handouts to destroy their own boats – which in turn, put an end to the entire fishing community it was once built around.’

Well I stood so proud in my ‘fourty-five’

To the great beyond I followed the tide

Just like my father in his prime

As he cast his net to the waterline

Oh but down, down, oh dilly down

These harbour lights are our jewelled crown

And while we watch without a sound

We’ll watch these boats run to the ground

To the roaring waves I will follow you

And to the distant shores I’ll bid adieu

And I’ll anchor down to plow the brine

And I will fill my hold by the waterline

The album’s 10 original songs are immersed in the tradition but free from any constraints. As admirers have noted, her compositions sound as if they could have been collected and sung a century ago. Except there is a subtle, thoroughly contemporary twist. ‘My approach to songwriting is to try to be as authentic as possible while keeping a foothold in the folk tradition – it’s a balancing act but every song is personal to me at some level.’

The clarity and serenity of Michell’s vocal, the deftness of her phrasing and the power of her narrative are admirable. Folk researchers and archivists of the future may not have to dig so deep, such is her authenticity. Her long-awaited follow-up to 2019’s The Wildest Rose is a triumph and in Waterline, the longest track, we are graced with as modern a folk song one could hope to hear.

Oh but policy is written in the sand

So we burned our boats with our own bare hands

Now as labourers on land we’ll be

Far from the raging of the sea

Now my boat is dry and her wood is pale

And no more the waters will she sail

And where once she leaned so proud and fine

Now she sits so high by the waterline

Elsewhere, the collaborations blossom. The lovely lead single Hourglass, a reminder to cherish every moment and dedicated to her late father, boasts a delicious duet with Scotland’s Liverpool-based Calum Gilligan. Flowers is a murder ballad, co-written and sung by Daria Kulesh, her bandmate in the trio Michell, Pfeiffer & Kulesh. The Woodlark & The Fieldfare enlists Dorset duo Ninebarrow (Jon Whitley and Jay LaBouchardiere) for a meditation on ‘the wisdom and whispers of nature’.

Storytelling pearls of the sea abound: the stirring title track, featuring Fairport’s Chris Leslie on multi-tracked fiddle, re-enacts the story of passenger steamship the SS Koningin der Nederlanden (Queen of the Netherlands) recommissioned to repatriate war-weary troops; St Helens honours an ancestor’s escape from Ireland to the cotton mills of Lancashire in 1850; Lady Constance pays tribute to Irish political activist and philanthropist Constance Markievicz who died having ‘given all her pennies to the poor and weak that she had saved’; All The Bonny Ships celebrates Michell’s Polish grandparents, separated for seven years by the second world war before reuniting; My Love Is Like The Rondelet similarly recounts ‘a love separated impossibly by distance and time’.

Fiddle also adorns Requiem, courtesy of Show Of Hands’ Phil Beer, an homage to the great Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘referencing his poem and epitaph of the same name’ and delivered in his mouthpiece. Completing the support cast are Lukas Drinkwater on double bass and Vicki Swan on the Scottish smallpipes. Michell herself plays guitar, bouzouki and accordion.

The Queen Of The Lowlands, produced by Megson’s Stu Hanna who contributes a number of instruments, must be a contender for folk album of the year. We missed Michell’s recent album launch at a church in Hampstead but we are already part of the wider congregation.

Personal histories, tales of remarkable people, songs for the ages. In Michell’s sophisticated care, the past is relatable and not so distant. This is the sound of timelessness.

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Strung Out On The Line: Jon Wilks (featuring Ellie Gowers)

We are hoping Jon Wilks’ collaboration with fellow folk singer Ellie Gowers for his latest single, Strung Out On The Line, has a longer lifespan than just this track. Our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com has left us politely pleading for more.

On his website Wilks describes the twists and turns of the song’s journey, his blog generously writing this blog for me. Some songs can fall into place quickly, and the great ones among them never give that impression. This joint composition, about ‘the lingering pull of what’s gone’, has taken its time – but it has been worth every painstaking moment.

‘I’d had the guitar part and melody for months – something a bit Nick Drake-ish, all hanging chords and uncertainty – and while I liked the atmosphere, it never quite became a song. A few lines floated through, but nothing that stuck. Still, it kept nagging at me.’

Wilks’ guitar part, its Drake-ish warmth and bright invention, tickles the senses first. Enter the influence of Gowers and her exquisite harmonies. She and Wilks had always intended to write together, and the Midlands-born guitarist is grateful the alliance happened. Their vocal chemistry is immediately evident.

‘At the end of 2024, I sent the idea to Ellie and she replied almost immediately saying it gave her ideas straight away, which was encouraging. We set a date for the spring. In March, on one of the first properly sunny days of the year, I drove up from Hampshire to Birmingham and spent the day in Ellie’s garden near Edgbaston Cricket Ground. We sat outside with guitars, tea and notebooks. I’m not a particularly focused writer – I tend to meander – but Ellie was the opposite. Within half an hour she had the first verse and chorus pretty much nailed.’

I heard that you’d settled down

How do you leave this town?

As for me, I’m still here

Chasing down the memories through the years

I chased you down a dusky lane

Until you hopped the garden gate

Where the old river flows

That’s where I ran out of road

There’s no rhyme or reason

For the wanting of the days gone by

Turning through the seasons

We’re just memories of memories in time

Patterns fade and I’m strung out on the line

‘That set the tone. I brought in some old lyrics about memories of memories, which came from a conversation I’d had with Jim Moray a year or so earlier – about how we don’t really remember events themselves, we just remember the last time we told ourselves a story about them. From there, nostalgia crept in. With Ellie’s careful ear guiding the shape, the song started writing itself. By the evening it was done.

‘We recorded the basic track a few weeks later, in April, at a small Stirchley studio owned by Laurence Hunt, who also played drums on the track. It was me, Ellie, Laurence and Jon Nice all squeezed in, tracking guitars, percussion and vocals. My vocals were re-recorded later, and Jon added keys from his home studio once he’d had time to live with the song. Ellie was there again, tuning in to all the subtleties, hearing things I hadn’t. The arrangement came alive in her hands.

‘Laurence picked up on a samba-like rhythm hiding under the surface. We took a lunch break and listened to The Obvious Child by Paul Simon, then Laurence got to work bringing that flavour to the track – not too overt, just a lilt to carry it along. The sumptuous final mix was handled by Albert Hansell at Wildgoose Studios in May.’

The track, along with lively lead single Could You Be The One?, will appear on Wilks’ fifth solo album Needless Alley, produced by Joe Sartin (son of Jon’s late great friend Paul Sartin) and due for release in October. Strung Out On The Line will be the only track featuring Gowers but her stamp seeps through like a stick of seaside rock.

Both artists have been applauded on this website, Wilks for his wonderful ode to Soho, Greek Street (written in one sitting, unlike our Song Of The Week this time) and Gowers for the delightful Woman Of The Waterways and environmental wake-up call Waking Up To Stone from her impressive Dwelling By The Weir album.

Wilks, lauded for his fingerstyle guitar prowess and admirable interpretations of traditional music like his guru Martin Carthy, appears just as comfortable in a contemporary setting. He is quick to acknowledge the role of Gowers, his ‘quiet constant guide’ who became central to the album’s making.

‘After I released Before I Knew What Had Begun I Had Already Lost, she pushed me –gently but persistently – to write more original material. I wasn’t sure I had a whole album in me, but she seemed to think otherwise. I sent her so much of this album during the writing phase. In that sense, she became something of a mentor. I’m not sure it would’ve come together without her.’

Some tribute, some song. It may have been in gestation for a while but we took only an instant to like it. ‘We’re just memories of memories in time.’

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