Songs of the Week 2026: Take 1

Neil Morton

FEATURED SONG OF THE WEEK

Heaven Has No Wings: Dove Ellis

Music scribes and aficionados are desperate to know more about Dove Ellis. The Galway-born songwriter has so far avoided interviews while internet trawls offer no biographies or promotional hype. We assume he prefers to let his music do the talking, and Heaven Has No Wings, our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, is as mysterious as the young man himself.

The Irish musician, according to his sparse Wikipedia page, is either 22 or 23. He is a riddle wrapped in an enigma, and the curious wonder of his voice, which has invited comparisons with Thom Yorke and both Buckleys, Tim and Jeff, only heightens the mystique. For this listener, the texture and elasticity of range evoke Rufus Wainwright; Ellis has a falsetto to cry for.

He is a gifted wordsmith whose abstract lyrics on debut album Blizzard are often as obscure as their narrator. We don’t expect our songwriting heroes to spell things out for us, to decipher the ambiguities; interpretation is part of the listening joy. But the odd clue would not go amiss.

There is a darkness to Heaven Has No Wings that disturbs. References to ‘babies wailing on a tightrope’ and ‘this winter of dust’ suggest a bleak, almost apocalyptic landscape, and the second verse conjures a god-fearing tyrannical figure. This Dove does not take kindly to hawks.

We all catch falcons

We’ve all got meat on our hands

But he strokes their angry beaks

Speaks to them his sickly truths

And he sends them back into the sky

Saying take me far away

Then blast me down with fire and rain

The official lyric website credits Thomas O’Donoghue as songwriter. This must be his real name. His Dove Ellis project, in the wake of rave receptions on the live scene in Manchester where he is based, impressed as opening act for Geese on their US tour. The big labels were shunned in favour of an independent. A single appeared in September, the gorgeously melodic To The Sandals, hinting at jewels to follow.

They followed. The album was released as Christmas trees were being dressed and after all the year-end reviews and best-of lists had been posted. This must have been a deliberate ploy. There was no drum-roll fanfare but the quality of the music – Little Left Hope, Love Is, Pale Song and the aching break-up ballad When You Tie Your Hair Up – begged scrutiny. The radar would not be escaped.

Blizzard would have made many of those lists. Its soaring choral harmonies recall chamber-pop kings Queen but the down-home production has a classic indie vibe, with splashes of Seventies rock piano, guitars, sax, clarinet, cello, viola, accordion and percussion. At times we could be sitting in on a Big Thief jam.

Hooks abound, illuminated by that fragile yet soul-baring voice and the honesty of the lyrics, sometimes brutal, sometimes beautiful, sometimes both. There is romanticism and rage here among the whispers and wails. As Paste Magazine observed: ‘It never feels derivative. Where many peers echo past voices to trade on nostalgia, Ellis uses those echoes as scaffolding for his own tonal world – one where sincerity is reasserted as avant-garde… without retreating into pastiche.’

On the opener Little Left Hope he sings: ‘Now is the fake/ The real is the word.’ On the plaintive Pale Song: ‘The past is like a sign/ A sign that never talks/ A sign you think you’ve lived/ But it’s just stone with a little chalk.’ On the glorious singalong Love Is: ‘Love is not the antidote to all your problems.’ And on closing track Away You Stride: ‘I shoot at clouds, I stab at lights/ I’m ducking into crowds/ I saw you in the absence of light… Keep those cameras off my face.’ Elusive to the last.

Coy youth rarely sounds this wise. We have a songwriting force in our midst, an introvert with talent overload. One reviewer last year remarked that he might have been hearing the new Van Morrison. No wonder Ellis is keeping a low profile. His development will be fascinating to behold. A Dove is ready to take flight.

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Built To Collide: Tessa Rose Jackson

For seven years, Tessa Rose Jackson recorded under the alias Someone. We are so pleased she has emerged from relative obscurity. If the buoyant Built To Collide, our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, and three other advanced singles are any guide, her forthcoming album will be a delight.

The Amsterdam-born indie songwriter with British roots calls Built To Collide her ‘rant’ song. ‘It’s a track about accepting that sometimes you live and you learn, and sometimes you live and you don’t learn. It’s what makes us so gloriously, imperfectly human. We repeat old mistakes sometimes. We stumble into the same potholes – and this song celebrates it. It’s an invitation to poke fun at yourself a bit. Thought you knew better by now? Well guess what, you don’t! Dust yourself off, have a little laugh. And move on.’

The track has an infectious drive, and the fine vocal feels liberating…

I heard you hit a brick wall

Trying to find the words

The words to paint the picture without seeing it first

What a thing to try, what a thing to strive for

Have you done that before?

Did it work out?

I heard you hit a brick wall

And then you played dead

Scared to death of dying, so you faked it instead

Oh, you’re a good actor

You sure fooled me

I never saw you breathe

Full speed ahead, head first and travelling light

We were built to collide

Sometimes

The song was a collaboration with guitarist Benjamin Longman, an old friend from their students days at the BRIT School in London. ‘He had written an instrumental demo for another project that had been put on hold. I loved the energy of it so much, and Ben had given me permission to turn it into a full song. It’s a linear track, it stays on the same chord for ages until the moment where it finally breaks into a new chord change and the whole thing opens up.

‘Originally, I had planned to restructure it, to give it a chorus. But when I sat down with it I thought I’d to do a quick pass of myself just improvising to the song as it was, and it felt unbelievably good. That first take was very close to the final melody and lyric I landed on. It was a wonderful feeling to just rant and rant and rant over this same chord and then have a singular moment of release – so I decided to leave it unchanged.’

In an interview with neun magazine the 33-year-old Jackson addressed her old moniker. ‘Someone was a kind of Mary Poppins. She did her job. People can’t find the stuff I really, really care about. It’s not connected to me. Someone has worked its magic as a name and taken me as far as it could. Now it’s time to continue under my own name. Nothing will change, stylistically and musically. It’s just an outward-facing decision.’

So she began the journey to greater recognition, first, with an EP as herself, then with The Lighthouse, due for release on January 23. The new album, a reflection on loss, love, ancestry and belonging, was written in rural France, near a cemetery, in a deliberate act of solitude. She slackened the grip of her perfectionist tendency. ‘I’ve kind of been circling a runway,’ said the film score composer and visual artist. ‘With this album, I’ve landed.’

On The Bricks That Make The Building, she muses on ‘the passing of the torch, the gifting of time’. ‘I was raised by two mothers and lost one of them when I was a young teenager. So it makes sense that the concept of mortality and what we leave behind has always loomed large in my life. The lyric is written from two perspectives – the perspective of a spirit, visiting their old home and watching the next generation going about their evening. And the perspective of the child, considering their heritage.’

Two songs refer directly to the mother she lost, Wild Geese and Gently Now, like love letters. She speaks of her often – with her surviving mum and her sister – and is keen to share the music with both. ‘How can anyone speak about death without, one way or the other, ending up talking about life? The chaotic beauty of it. The maddening incomprehensibility of it. And the knowledge that – however way you swing it – it is fated to pass. All the more reason to celebrate it.’

The gorgeous Fear Bangs The Drum is about learning to live with fear. ‘I call this my courage song. I am quite a fearful person, increasingly so as I get older. Frequently worried about something happening to my loved ones, or about the state of the world. Fear can be paralysing, especially if it’s a night-time spiral. Recently, instead of trying to push it down I’ve been allowing myself to let it bubble to the surface and just let it be – not acting on it but also not fighting it. Maybe even learning to use it.’

As she sings on Built To Collide…

I heard you touched a live wire

And it left a mark

Fear’s a bad conductor

You better cherish the spark…

Well, you’re a curious kid

Don’t swerve the conversation

Lean into it

All eyes, all eyes, eyes and ears

We all need a mirror sometimes

We all need a mirror sometimes

Sometimes

We witnessed the start of her rediscovery at London’s St Pancras Old Church in April last year when she shared the stage with Edward Randell and Hattie Whitehead, who contributes harmony vocals on the new album. She performed a beautiful version of her song Anti-Hero – not the Taylor Swift track – with the help of a string quartet.

Jackson includes Laura Marling, Nick Drake, Feist and This Is The Kit (aka Kate Stables) as musical influences. We can also hear hints of other noms de plume, The Weather Station (Tamara Lindeman) and Flock Of Dimes (Jenn Wasner). She is relieved to have shed that pseudonym, which was meant to promote creative freedom. Now she really can be someone.

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Take This Day: Salt House

January is a time for reflection, of what might have been and what might still be. Albums and songs which somehow passed you by in the old year suddenly re-emerge to bring new cheer. We should not have missed folk trio Salt House’s beautiful album Scarrow, and certainly not its lead single, Take This Day, a belated Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com. We’re making up for lost time.

Scarrow means faint light, something that gleams dimly or intermittently. But this album glows brightly and Take This Day, written and charmingly sung by newest member Anna Hughes, is a quiet joy. The track is a poetic celebration of stillness and the little, unexpected pleasures of life on an album that promotes community, hope and shared moments in uncertain times.

There’s a grace in the surrender

To this unadorned contentment

There’s a place for potential

In the course of this conversation

When time has turned to gold

And every sunrise makes us old

Hold on

Our sorrows are not grand

Not when we dwell so idly

And all our hollow hands

Never held tomorrow so lightly

When time has turned to gold

And every sunrise makes us old

Hold on

Days like this will come

We made the pub our church

And we made those songs our scriptures

We pulled up on the verge

And we made the stars our future

When you’re frightened of the clock And you wish the tide would stop

Or for the sand to turn to stone

So you can build yourself a home

Hold on

Hughes’ music, whether through the medium of violin, viola or tenor guitar, is inspired by the wonders of the natural world, a perfect fit for Salt House. Part of the Northumbrian duo Watersmeet with Jessie Howard, Hughes replaced Lauren MacColl who left Salt House in 2024, after their lauded Riverwoods album, to pursue other projects.

The Salt House sound is influenced by the landscapes of Northumberland, the Scottish Highlands and Shetland, the respective homes of multi-instrumentalist Hughes, guitarist Ewan MacPherson and Jenny Sturgeon (harmonium and guitar). They incorporate bucolic life into the fabric of the music that speaks of a mutual love of place, people and evolving tradition.

The band took their name from a dock in MacPherson’s native Liverpool. Raised in Wales, he trained at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts before moving to Edinburgh in 1999. His songs, like all the Salt House originals, feel as if they have been here for decades while ancient ballads and texts are given fresh voice.

Apart from their solo work, all have been generous collaborators: Sturgeon with MG Boulter, Birdvox and Outliers, Macpherson with ‘folkedelic loonies’ Shooglenifty, Malinky and Nu-Nordic quartet Fribo, and Hughes across diverse projects including her duo. Their alliance with The Furrow Collective was warmly received.

Scarrow is produced by old cohort Andy Bell who contributes synth with Ben Nicholls on electric and double bass and Magnus Lundmark on percussion. Hughes’s other contributions are equally spellbinding: the deliciously dark I Met At Eve, inspired by a Walter De La Mare poem; the gorgeous Waiting For Summer; and Headed Our Way, a wake-up call from birdlife about the damage we inflict on the environment.

You’ll learn the hard way

The hardest hit by the blistering wildfires

Headed our way

We designed height

You chopped it down

To build your buildings higher

And banish us to ground

So we designed flight

You made yours loud

Sent your engines roaring

So you could travel on a cloud

Sturgeon’s Snow Walking is a delightfully clever foot-tapper; Fathoms is a lament to a lover lost to the sea; and Blackbird is a love letter to a feathered friend (‘His chorus is our song’) – she has a PhD in seabird ecology. MacPherson’s Jansch-like timbre reverberates through Horizon, Cut Him Out In Little Stars and the lovely Share The Light, making this an album to savour.

The harmonies by Sturgeon and Hughes on the latter interweave magically over the fireside glow of MacPherson’s tender vocal in a song that encapsulates Salt House’s central message about the importance of connection: ‘I love it when the fire is glowing/ And bright the moonlight on the wall/ I love it when the music’s flowing/ And later when the talk is low.’ The light on Scarrow is far from faint.

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