Songs Of The Week 2025: Take 4

Neil Morton 

FEATURED SONG OF THE WEEK

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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