Songs of the Week 2026: Take 1
- 1 day ago
- 28 min read
Updated: 8 minutes ago
Neil Morton
FEATURED SONG OF THE WEEK
Long Distance Love: Little Feat (Featuring Amy Helm)
Little Feat’s remembrance of one of their most cherished songs could never be a slavish remake. What would be the point? And so their celebration of Long Distance Love, more than 50 years after the late Lowell George wrote it, springs a couple of surprises with Bill Payne’s bluesy introduction and piano-bathed coda. Beautiful bookends.
Our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com and its evocative accompanying video are ‘dedicated to friends living and past, to ideals, dreams and reality, life weathered. In a world of hurt and loss the heart takes refuge where tenderness resides’.
The band do not explain why this reimagined ballad took so long to be released unless it was always intended to mark the band’s long, slow goodbye to touring. The track and video were recorded during the Covid lockdown of 2020, and it was the first material to feature new Little Feat recruits Scott Sharrard on lead vocals and guitars and drummer Tony Leone. Amy Helm, daughter of The Band’s late drummer Levon, joins them on backing vocals, echoing the role of Valerie Carter.
George’s soulful vocal is impossible to replicate; that ache is in the gift of only a few. If you hadn’t heard the original, you would have no complaints with Sharrard’s impassioned interpretation. As a slide guitarist he is no slouch either.
Oh, hello. Give me missing persons. They said
‘What is it that you need?’
I said oh, I need her so. They said you’ve
Got to stop your pleadin’
’Cause no matter what you do
Even pray to heaven above
All you’ll ever get from her is
Long distance love
Michigan-born Sharrard, who joined the latest iteration of Little Feat following the death of guitarist Paul Barrere on the back of his work with the Doobie Brothers and Gregg Allman, explained: ‘Looking back on this time, and rewatching the video where we are all alone in our homes, backyards and friends’ studios, it’s a reminder of how far we have come since those early days in our reformation of the band.
‘The linchpin of this undertaking was the addition of Tony Leone on drums. Playing this deceptively simple Feat ballad was one hell of an audition. Tony’s ability to honour the grace and ingenuity of Richie Hayward’s precision, while quietly injecting his own subtle and nuanced swing, was a bit of a magic trick, especially under the recording circumstances where we could not be together as a band.
‘The track is a testament to resilience in the face of adversity, and a tribute to this band’s legacy, and our incredible community of fans and music collaborators. Amy Helm has been a good friend to us all for many years, and singing this track with her was like a family reunion that really added the special sauce to this reinterpretation.
‘Bill’s keyboard intro and coda gave us a welcome reframing of the piece. Bill is the master of the vibe shift, and I’m so grateful that he composed those sections to help revisit this classic tune. Though we have all been reunited in person and persevered as a band through two album cycles and many tours, there is a yearning in these song lyrics that rings more true every day as we navigate these trying times. Great music is timeless and essential for our healing. Little Feat will continue to spread the message of unity, funk and soul as we embark on The Last Farewell Tour together this year.’
Sharrard, who names his guitar heroes as George, Barrere, Warren Haynes, Duane Allman and Bonnie Raitt, was asked by Vintage Guitar magazine how a Los Angeles-based band like Little Feat adopted a swampy, Louisiana vibe. ‘You could argue that all great American music was born in the South and exported to the coasts and beyond. Every musician on the planet owes their debt to the music of New Orleans. That said, Little Feat is funky, and I don’t mean slick funky; I’m talking about legit funk that we as musicians recognise as being just nasty. What the band adds on top could be compared to anything from Thelonious Monk to Hunter S Thompson. I suppose that’s what rock ’n’ roll is – a real bitches’ brew. Long may it reign.’
At the age of 12 he was allowed to stay up late to watch Feat play Let It Roll on Saturday Night Live, what he called ‘one of my big bang moments’. He added: ‘I grew up with the lifestyle of the way Little Feat music was crafted and Lowell George was a key influence of mine. I was an overweight, Midwestern middle-class white kid and when I heard Lowell sing and play – he kind of proved to me what might be possible for who I was. It was that deep for me as a kid.’
The Last Farewell Tour is Little Feat’s tongue-in-cheek title, a nod to 1975’s The Last Record Album distinguished by Lowell’s masterpiece. The band’s gradual retirement from extensive touring will begin in April.
Payne, co-founder with George, told Rolling Stone: ‘Everybody and their brother is retiring now. I resisted it at first. I’ll be 77 in March, and [guitarist] Fred Tackett is 80 and [bassist] Kenny [Gradney] will be 76 next year. But what’s the rush on farewelling this thing? It’s not an immediate cut-off. You can do residences, or play music with other people or do special events. With luck the wind-down will take several years to accomplish.’ Percussionist Sam Clayton is 80 in March. At 49 and 56 respectively, Sharrard and Leone must feel like whipper-snappers.
The new single, produced by Payne and Charles A Martinez, is twinned with Feathers And A Smile, an earlier Song of the Week here, a reworking of a little-known composition written by George back in the late Sixties. Lowell’s daughter Inara George, who features on backing vocals, was just under five years old when he died in 1979 at the age of 34. Long distance love all over again.
When The Love Is New: Shakey Graves
It must be thrilling, if a little intimidating, to have a day named after you. Shakey Graves Day in Austin, Texas, honours one of the city’s favourite sons, and his latest single, When The Love Is New, could become one of its favourite songs.
Our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com is a bluesy, rootsy earworm of a track whose release followed a weekend of sold-out, back-to-back hometown shows. Shakey Graves Day is never confined to 24 hours.
The song was billed as ‘an intimate, avant-garde folk-rock meditation – spare, emotional, and quietly experimental – capturing the restless, creative spirit that has long defined his work’. We trust a new album is on the way.
The Austin tradition celebrates the work of one of its most inventive singer-songwriters who started out as a busker and has continued to embrace that raw musical spirit. The annual occasion was launched by the then mayor in 2012 to raise funds for community causes. At this year’s festivities fans were offered pay-what-you-like items from Graves’ back catalogue on Bandcamp and a selection of merchandise with proceeds aiding the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians.
Shakey Graves is obviously a stage alias; the 38-year-old Texan was born Alejandro Rose-Garcia, inspired by his parents’ deep involvement with the theatre. His do-it-yourself approach to performance is typified by the new single. He sings and plays all instruments and he directed and produced the accompanying video in which he stars.
Rose-Garcia creates an atmospheric soundscape to suit the song’s reflection on love’s fleeting nature. Percussive folk noir from the outset…
Something’s here I recognise
Something I ain’t seen in quite some time
Something sweet, something to do
Always and forever when the love is new
Something here I cannot say
Something close yet far away
Something wrong, something to prove
Say it doesn’t matter when the love is new
You say that it’s forever
Say that it’s forever
Yeah we’re both in this together
Say that it’s forever when the love is new
The name started out as a campfire joke in 2007 at the Old Settlers Music Festival in Driftwood, Texas, after a ‘high’ passer-by warned him to beware ‘spooky wagons’. He and his friends played around with Native American guide names based on the phrase, with Rose-Garcia settling on Shaky Graves. It sounded an authentic fit for his down-to-earth music and it stuck. From member of the trash-collecting crew to musician on the main stage… that was some journey.
It’s fine to call him Shakey. ‘When people call me Alejandro, it can sound like I’m in trouble with my mom,’ he told Garden & Gun, the magazine describing his 2014 breakthrough album And The War Came as ‘sounding like Bob Dylan hanging out at RL Burnside’s house, passing around a jar of hooch’. Troubadour folk singing, resonating blues guitar licks and gritty, witty lyricism are transformed into rollicking rock ’n’ roll when he is backed by a full band.
Before the music bug consumed him, Shakey was an actor. ‘I was really into theatre in school and wanted to try acting,’ he said. ‘My mom was a playwright, so she understood the creative process. One day she said, ‘If you really want to do it, let’s go now’.’ In Los Angeles the youngster hit the audition trail, landing bit parts in various television shows. ‘I was the guy you saw for two minutes on CSI,’ he joked. His biggest acting gig came when he visited friends back in Austin and auditioned for Friday Night Lights.
He had started writing songs in high school and, with the money earned from FNL, moved to New York to play at various open-mic nights. He persevered and word soon spread about the one-man band with the kick-start drum made out of a suitcase. The image suited at first but he evolved from the singular showman, embracing experimental sounds and collaborations (with Esmé Patterson, Jess Williamson and Sierra Ferrell) and what he calls ‘regenerative’ music.
Graves’ 2023 album Movie Of The Week, his most ambitious project, made the listener a collaborator. It began as a soundtrack for a film that never got off the ground. But he ploughed on and he and his band created their own imaginary soundtrack. ‘I love how the human brain applies plot to things,’ he told Under The Radar. ‘Like if you put a movie on and then play music over it, your brain will connect and recontextualise them. My intended goal is to have people apply that concept to this album.
‘What I like is the idea that somebody’s going to make a better album out of this body of music than I can, but they’re going to do it by accident. It’s going to be titled something more interesting, arranged in a way that I had never thought about, and might even be able to pull a narrative out of it that I didn’t intend. It makes this album regenerative.’
He explained the interactive experience: listeners were invited to hear myriad versions of the tracks on his website where they were given space to insert a word of their choice to change the theme and the vibe and create their own soundtrack and artwork – with a little help generated by AI, it should be added. ‘In the universe of Shakey Graves, every song is a renewable resource, containing infinite possibilities.’
When The Love Is New is a genre-fluid track by a multi-media artist committed to taking risks while staying loyal to the community that made him. In Austin, and not just on Shakey Graves Day, the love isn’t new but it’s stronger than ever. That’s what you call roots music.
Daisy: Jessie Reid
Shropshire-born indie folk artist Jessie Reid generously answered our encore request at London’s Green Note this week with a lovely performance of Daisy, a track from her latest album Little Sparks and our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com. The sparks lit up the room in Camden all evening.
The blues-tinged Daisy was inspired by the subject matter for her PhD in English literature at Leicester University. Reid began studying the works of F Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf during lockdown. Daisy Fay Buchanan, a fictional wealthy New York socialite, is at the heart of Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby about a tortured love triangle. Not all essays boast a soundtrack.
Reid told Here Comes The Song: ‘I wrote a chapter on Fitzgerald’s work for my PhD. It was the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby last year so I was invited to a conference in New York to read my paper, but I also composed a song for the occasion. In the book, Daisy is an idealised love Gatsby can never truly reach. In the song, I tried to recapture this longing and illusion: a man chasing an impossible happiness, crying for Daisy night and day.’
It was 1922 in New York State
Just a green light calling a love across the bay
Hear the echoes of the jazz age in the clink of champagne
He’s building his empire just to ease the pain
For some dreams linger, some wounds don’t heal
Some lights burn brighter than the pain we feel
Pain we feel
He cries for Daisy
Night and day
A life of gold was all she chose to play
With the bootleg boy who’d come to get his own way
Left for dead in the shallows but his story won’t fade
You know time moves on but it leaves a stain
Fitzgerald is said to have based the character on Chicago socialite Ginevra King with whom he shared a romance from 1915 to 1917. Their relationship ended after King’s father warned the writer that ‘poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls’. A crestfallen Fitzgerald dropped out of Princeton and enlisted in the US Army during the first world war. Did he cry for Ginevra night and day? Apparently so.
Reid’s musical journey reached new milestones shortly after her PhD viva in 2024 when she played Glastonbury for the first time. Among other festivals last year she supported Loudon Wainwright III at three sold-out shows at Nell’s Jazz & Blues in West Kensington and a short tour of Ireland followed.
Reviewers should now resist comparing her style to Ben Howard, Lucy Rose and Nick Mulvey; she has her own distinctive sound based on her dreamy, hushed vocals and a subtle percussive guitar technique. It has been called ‘laptap’ because of its raps and slaps on the guitar body but the term only hints at the intricacy involved.
‘I played drums originally,’ says the Lancaster University music graduate, ‘so when I started wanting to write songs I tried to combine the percussive, rhythmic elements with the melodic and lyrical stuff. I also play around with lots of different tunings.’
Reid makes delicacy a strength, understatement a forte. She says of the album: ‘These songs stress the importance of noticing the small things that give us meaning, even when life feels heavy. Some of the songs are soft and personal, while others wrestle with darker feelings. Sitting somewhere in between are songs about struggle, but also about staying strong and holding on. I’d like to think that the title track ties it all together. The idea that, even in the midst of the mundane, we can find little sparks of light worth chasing and holding on to. It feels honest, and I hope that these songs can be little sparks for anyone who needs them.’
American cellist Harley Eblen conjures an eerie entrance to Little Sparks as Reid’s wispy delivery sings of ‘those fleeting, everyday moments that remind us how fragile and beautiful life is’. As fragile and beautiful as her own lead and harmony vocals. Joey Walker, who shares production credits with Joseph Futak, contributes moody synth and percussion.
Tell me can you feel it
Feel it in your bones
(I found love instead, it’s not all in my head)
Even in the long dark days
(I found love)
Know you’re not alone
(I found love instead, it’s not all in my head)
All we love
Was just enough
See those little sparks
Hidden in the dark
French-born Adrien Latgé, who used to perform under the alias of Easymess, shares vocals on Against The Tide and Beauty In The Sadness as he did on the earlier captivating single A Little Closer. Latgé helped out on harmonies and percussion at the Green Note, where Daisy was adorned by Laura Reznek’s accomplished violin, as it is on the album.
There are three former Songs of the Week on the album: The Devil Calls, a warning to herself (‘Give me something more/ To keep me guided/ Someone, to live a better life with/ I need something more/ Than just survival/ Someone to give the breath of life’); Every Stranger, a meditation on learning to cope during traumatic times; and the equally empathetic Your Story. Every Stranger spoke about her own loss, now it was her turn to listen to the grief of another, a fellow passenger on a train, in Your Story.
Reid’s own story continues to gather momentum. Before our encore call at the Green Note, Reid had intended to play Whole Heart, released as a single in 2021 and the title track of her debut album. Like many of her other songs, it has garnered millions of streams on Spotify. That might suggest burgeoning popularity but it doesn’t pay the bills or fund the art. If only humble musicians could benefit as much from streaming as they used to from record sales.
Professor Martin Halliwell, her PhD supervisor at Leicester, said during her breakthrough year: ‘Jessie is an amazing musical talent. She has a voice that lingers with you long after a song has ended.’ The morning after the show we were still singing: ‘He cries for Daisy… all night long.’ Encore.
Streets Of Minneapolis: Bruce Springsteen
Two songs, an original and a cover, have been released in the wake of the frightening events in Minneapolis and other cities across the United States. The protest song cannot be dismissed as a relic of the past, thanks to Bruce Springsteen and the reimaginings of Susan O’Neill and Valerie June. ICE and fire.
Springsteen’s Streets Of Minneapolis, our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, is sung with rage and an impassioned rasp, with melodic nods to his own Streets Of Philadelphia and Dylan’s Desolation Row. The single followed the powerful cover of Stephen Stills’ celebrated song For What It’s Worth, released as a duet by Irish songwriter O’Neill and her American cohort June.
Springsteen, no fan of the US president Donald Trump, wrote the song in response to what he called ‘the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis’, dedicating it to the city, ‘our immigrant neighbours’ and in honour of the citizens slain by federal immigration agents, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Through the winter’s ice and cold
Down Nicollet Avenue
A city aflame fought fire and ice
’Neath an occupier’s boots
King Trump’s private army from the DHS
Guns belted to their coats
Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law
Or so their story goes
Against smoke and rubber bullets
By the dawn’s early light
Citizens stood for justice
Their voices ringing through the night
And there were bloody footprints
Where mercy should have stood
And two dead left to die on snow-filled streets
Alex Pretti and Renee Good
Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
The song begins acoustically before the full band swell the sound and feed the sense of outrage. Springsteen does not mince words about the latest killing and about what he calls the ‘dirty lies’ of Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. The songs ends with chants of ICE OUT as the final verse reverberates…
Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
For What It’s Worth has a similar backdrop of unrest on the streets. It was originally written by Stills and recorded by Buffalo Springfield in 1966, inspired by the Sunset Strip curfew riots a few months before. A gathering in memory of a bar and music venue Pandora’s Box being shut down in Hollywood got out of hand when police arrived to clear the area and enforce anti-loitering laws.
Stills was desperate to drive home for his guitar to formulate the ideas for a song swirling around his head but was stuck in the melee. Thank goodness he made it home. If a song can be iconic, this is one. This was the time of anti-Vietnam demonstrations and civil rights marches. Stills said the line ‘there’s a man with a gun over there/ Telling me I got to beware’ recalled a Viet Cong soldier he had seen on TV news footage.
When he presented it to the band’s label, he said: ‘I have this song here, for what it’s worth, if you want it.’ The title does not appear in the lyric and was given the subtitle Stop, Hey What’s That Sound in parenthesis to make the song more recognisable. ‘It was really different things intertwined, including the war and the absurdity of what was happening on the Strip,’ Stills told the LA Times. ‘But I knew I had to skedaddle and headed back to Topanga, where I wrote my song in about 15 minutes. For me, there was no riot. It was basically a cop dance. It was a funeral for Pandora’s Box. But it looked like a revolution.’
There’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Are getting so much resistance from behind
I think it’s time we stop
Hey, what’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s going down
O’Neill and June give their rendition a gospel feel, no suprise if you’ve followed their soulful careers. Their voices blend beautifully. Producer Christian Best provides sinister, booming drums on the single whose video traces protest movements past and present with proceeds going to Amnesty International. The women say: ‘This collaboration isn’t nostalgia. It’s a living reminder that songs can be soft enough to sit beside you, strong enough to move you, and powerful enough to keep the light on.’
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
Step out of line, the man come and take you away
Streets Of Minneapolis bears echoes of the song Neil Young wrote for CSNY, Ohio, after the Kent State University shootings in 1970. The band rushed into a studio, recorded the song and released it as a single in a matter of weeks. Similarly, Tony Poole of the British band Bennett Wilson Poole was so moved by Labour MP Jo Cox’s murder in 2016 that he spontaneously wrote the stunning track Hate Won’t Win.
All anthems against divisiveness. At a recent show in his home state of New Jersey, Springsteen paid tribute to Renee Good by dedicating his 1978 song The Promised Land to her. ‘Right now, we are living through incredibly critical times. The United States – the ideals and the values for which it stood for the past 250 years – is being tested as it’s never been in modern times. If you believe in the power of the law and that no one stands above it, if you stand against heavily armed masked federal troops invading an American city, using Gestapo tactics against our fellow citizens, if you believe you don’t deserve to be murdered for exercising your American right to protest, send a message to this president as the mayor of that city has said, ICE should get the fuck out of Minneapolis.’
The song will not appear on the president’s playlist, if he has one; leave that to Barack Obama. Trump responded to Springsteen’s criticism by calling the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame member ‘not a talented guy’ and a ‘pushy, obnoxious jerk’. His administration has no time for deranged radicals or ‘random songs with irrelevant opinions and inaccurate information’. For different reasons, we wouldn’t argue with either Boss.
Outsider: Courtney Marie Andrews
Courtney Marie Andrews tells a moving tale about her early days as a busker in Paris. The Phoenix, Arizona-born songwriter found a note in her guitar case written by an admirer thanking her for a song she had performed. He had lost someone close and her words resonated and helped him grieve.
If she was not yet convinced of her calling, such a reaction was a powerful incentive to continue composing songs that touched and comforted. The sentiment in that note has been echoed on merch tables wherever she has played. Nashville-based Andrews’ powers of empathy have shone through her catalogue, most notably on her 10th and latest album, Valentine.
Perhaps her gift for connecting with audiences lies in her positioning as an outsider, whether in her own affairs of the heart or when writing so wonderfully about them. Outsider is one of Valentine’s standout tracks and our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com.
I wanna be an outsider
It’s too painful looking in
Have fun with the insiders
The risk is too big
Valentine is her most fearlessly honest album yet, an exploration of love at its most complicated and challenging. Written during a period embracing the near loss of a loved one, the traumatic end of a relationship and the uncertain start of a new romance, the 10 tracks capture Andrews at her most vulnerable.
‘Valentine is a record in pursuit of love,’ Andrews says. ‘That love is a lot more than I gave it credit for. It’s built over years, it’s built with trust, with changes, it becomes something new and unrecognisable, the deeper you go.’
Co-produced by multi-instrumentalist Jerry Bernhardt, the album is said to have been influenced sonically by Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra, Big Star, Fleetwood Mac and Hasten Down The Wind-era Linda Ronstadt. Andrews said recently how much she was enamoured with the great American songbook. Perhaps we can look forward to an album of standards including one crooned by Nancy’s dad.
While Valentine marks her first new release since Loose Future in 2022, she has continued to break ground as a multi-medium artist. As well as conducting a songwriting workshop, Andrews published her second collection of poetry, Love Is A Dog That Bites When It’s Scared, and has enjoyed gallery exhibitions of the paintings she regularly offers followers on social media.
‘I was in one of the darkest periods of my life,’ Andrews explains, ‘and songs were the only way I could reckon with it. I felt cursed, and the only mental cure felt like songwriting and painting.’ The elegance and soulful ache of her vocal are what first drew us to her on 2016’s breakthrough album Honest Life.
Yes, I have my reasons
I’ve been burned before
You let them get close
Then they expose your core
You give them your heart
As they’re asking for more
You give them your world
Then they show you the door
I wanna be an outsider
It’s too painful looking in
How could I be an insider
When I don’t fit in?
Andrews, Bernhardt and Grizzly Bear percussionist Chris Bear are the only musicians on the self-funded album, a decision taken for economic reasons. But the singer wouldn’t have had it any other way such is the expansive sound generated by her various basses, high-strung guitars and flute and by Bernhardt’s multi-tasking.
Now 35, Andrews displays her remarkable range and emotional intensity from the outset. On Pendulum Swing she sings: ‘Man, I love a place/ Where no one knows my name/ Talking to strangers/ Where no one knows my shame… Gotta let the pendulum swing/ Can’t be good for too long.’ The Joni inflection on ‘too long’ is hard to ignore.
On Little Picture Of A Butterfly, with its backdrop of fluttering flute and synths and its melodic nod to Kris Kristofferson, she addresses the ‘pretty ghost’ she is saying goodbye to: ‘Guess I’m morally impure/ Guess your love is not a cure/ Guess I should’ve known better/ Guess I’m throwing out that sweater.’
On Everyone Wants To Feel Like You Do, her subject will probably recoil at the disapproval emphasised by a distorted guitar solo: ‘You’re not sorry for the music/ You’re not sorry for what’s felt/ You’re not sorry for space you take/ You’re not sorry for yourself/ You’re not sorry for existing/ For showing up late/ For bumping into someone like me that you hate.’ Ouch.
With its irresistible guitar hook, the engaging Only The Best For Baby again evokes old guru Mitchell as Andrews showcases her own lyrical gifts: ‘I will settle for your crumbs/ The child in me needs your love… I’m a masochist/ I’m a marionette/ I’m a mess making moves on you/ I am proudly wounded.’
In a fascinating interview with Bluegrass Situation, she speaks about life as an only child and the outsider stance that informs her songwriting: ‘Because I was a latchkey kid, I spent a lot of time alone. If I didn’t have a friend to play with, I had to go into the inner landscape of my mind. That was my way of communicating in a deeper way that I couldn’t quite get in my home life if my mom wasn’t home. I was a deeply imaginative kid and would create stories all the time. So I think the loneliness also fueled what I do now.’
We trust Andrews kept that note in her guitar case, a poignant souvenir. The outsider is a generous soul who bravely holds up a mirror to her inner self. A light in the darkness, hers and ours.
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.
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.
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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