Songs of the Week 2026: Take 2
- 2 days ago
- 28 min read
Updated: 2 hours ago
Neil Morton
FEATURED SONG OF THE WEEK
Pilot Whales: Kris Drever
When he heard about Emma Neave-Webb’s remarkable journey from London PA to marine conversationist in Orkney Kris Drever knew he had a song on his hands, the soundtrack of home. The Orkney-born musician was inspired by his fellow islander’s mission to save stranded whales. Pilot Whales, our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, appears on Drever’s latest album, Doing This For Love.
‘There’s so much helplessness around us right now,’ says the singer-guitarist, ‘it’s good to remember that every day we perform little acts of devotion so thoughtlessly we don’t even recognise them for what they are. This record was made with love for anyone who labours for love.’
Emma Neave-Webb’s labour-of-love story was told for BBC Radio 2’s 20th Century Folk in 2024, the year RNLI celebrated its 200th anniversary, a noble project in which people whose lives are intertwined with the sea were paired with songwriters eager to put their stories to music.
‘It was fascinating to meet Emma and hear her life story and the incredible work she does on the island of Sanday where my dad was born,’ said the Glasgow-based folk singer-songwriter. ‘Folk songs are traditionally based on ordinary people doing extraordinary things, so I hope this one raises awareness of the great marine conservation work Emma does.’
Drever referred to her ‘beautiful life’. It took a beautiful song to capture it. A catchy guitar hook is followed by his warm as whisky voice, a mouthpiece for his subject:
My daddy worked on engines, I hit the books
Went from a penny to an anchor, put feathers on my hooks
I lived half my life on a train
Writing strangers’ diaries, they never knew my name
They didn’t know I’d join a band on a gun-metal day
That drove the pilot whales away
The pilot whales away, the pilot whales away
From Portsmouth on the Pride of Bilbao
I met a man who showed me who I am now
I picked up those binoculars and everywhere I looked
I saw porpoises and dolphins and the whole world shook
And a thousand miles from here
I heard myself say
We drove the pilot whales away
The pilot whales away, we drove the pilot whales away
Neave-Webb told her local paper, the Press and Journal, about the deeds that inspired the song: ‘We had a pod of 40 pilot whales come into Sty Wick bay and were dangerously close to the shore. About 50 of us went on to the beach banging pots and pans to drive them away because pilot whales are very sensitive to noise. It worked but, at the time, some people asked what the point was. Now I think they realise how bad it could have been.’
That realisation dawned when shortly after her photoshoot with Drever for the BBC, and on the same beach, 77 whales were stranded. ‘It was horrific,’ said Neave-Webb, who moved to Sanday in 2015 to become the island’s ranger. ‘Taking in the sheer scale of the animals stranded was a shock to the system. We just stood there, feeling awful as we watched these animals struggle, and knew there was nothing we could safely do for them other than record what was happening.
‘We then had to start figuring out the logistics of calling in experts to gather as much information as possible, and getting access to this remote beach was very difficult. The response was a real community effort. We’ve had a good track record of saving stranded cetaceans here but this was the first time we couldn’t even attempt a rescue. Everybody is quite upset by it, even though we did everything we could.’
Everyone gets lost sometimes
No matter what they say
And I will hear those hearts in my mind
Until I’m on my way
She praised the value of Drever’s song: ‘Folk songs from Orkney have traditionally been about whaling, and usually pilot whales were hunted. It’s nice that this song has switched that on its head and we’re now saving them.’ If she was pleased with the acoustic original Drever played to her for the first time, she will be even more impressed with the richer recorded version.
Doing This For Love is a collection of songs Drever started writing during Covid and finished in the studio in September last year. It was worth the painstaking work. ‘I had lost all confidence around August and confessed as much to my long-time friend and collaborator Euan Burton during a catch-up in a Glasgow café. He convinced me to just book the next available few days in GloWorm Studios. As soon as we started tracking, the doubts disappeared. It all made sense.
‘Just do the work, be present, be kind to yourself. Everyone who helped make these versions of these songs did it with generosity and clarity. The music community in Glasgow is truly magnificent, so much comradeship, such responsible use of so much outrageous ability, a dream place to be working. It’s the first time I’ve made a studio album in the same city as my little family are living in, and the daily commute made it feel abundantly clear who and what I was doing this for.’
The Scottish songwriter, still a member of the lauded trio Lau and the magical Spell Songs project, can be heard moving further from traditional folk narratives toward the more personal. His 10 guitar-led songs muse on the unglamorous heroism of everyday life, the small sacrifices that keep families and relationships intact.
Those memorable guitar riffs anchor the record, his melodies intimate yet relatable, helped by a cast of collaborators – co-producer Burton on bass and keyboards, Louis Abbott and John Blease on drums, Matthew Herd on mellotron and sax, Cahalen Morrison on banjo, Trent Freeman on fiddle, Sam Mabbett on accordion, Ian Carr on guitar and backing vocalists Rachel Sermanni, Michelle Willis and Rachel Lightbody.
The album’s closer is the hypnotic Catterline, a previous Song of the Week here, and we could have chosen any of the other standouts: Bring Back Hanging Around in which he playfully pauses after the word ‘hanging’ before adding ‘around with my friends’, Change, Save A Space and the nostalgic Still The Boy on how is regarded when he returns to his roots: ‘Took a train up to the Highlands… keeping an eye out for an island, where I can be happy getting heavy and getting old.’
A certain marine conservationist, our ranger on the shore, will always welcome Drever and his music back to the islands. When she’s not saving whales, that is.
Seven Bridges Road: Track Dogs & Iain Matthews
A cover of the harmony-rich classic Seven Bridges Road, featuring the voice of one of its finest iterations, is our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com. When the Spain-based ensemble Track Dogs were invited to perform at a tribute to The Eagles in Madrid in 2024, they enjoyed singing the song so much they decided to keep it in their set and record it.
‘In April last year we played at Costa Festival in Ibiza and were fortunate enough to meet Iain Matthews, of Matthews Southern Comfort, whose own arrangement of this track had directly influenced the Eagles’ version,’ say Track Dogs in their Bandcamp introduction to the single.
‘It was never properly acknowledged unfortunately. Iain had distanced himself somewhat from the song in the interim but he graciously agreed to sing it with us that day after hearing our sound check. To cap it all he then recorded his vocal in Holland and sent it to us as well as some gorgeous slide guitar played by his producer BJ Baartmans. We’re thrilled with the result and feel we’ve played some small part in the history of this song, bringing it full circle.’
The song has some history. It was written by the late American musician Steve Young, who recorded it in 1969 for his Rock Salt & Nails album. It has since been covered by many artists, but the most celebrated versions were a five-part harmony arrangement by Lincolnshire-born Matthews in 1973 and a strangely familiar reworking by those American rock superstars The Eagles in 1980.
The largely acoustic Track Dogs single persuaded me to reach for my vinyl copy of Matthews’ solo album Valley Hi which includes Seven Bridges Road as well as a lovely rendition of Jackson Browne’s These Days. When they heard the Eagles’ incarnation of the song seven years later, Matthews and his producer Michael Nesmith, the former Monkee, must have been too choked for words.
‘Son of a gun if Don [Henley] or somebody in the Eagles didn’t lift our arrangement absolutely note for note for vocal harmony,’ Nesmith was quoted as saying. ‘If they can’t think it up themselves [and] they’ve got to steal it from somebody else, better they should steal it from me, I guess.’
Matthews recalled that in 1973 he and members of the Eagles got to know each other as regulars to the Troubadour: ‘We were forever going back to somebody’s house and playing music. Don Henley had a copy of Valley Hi that he liked, so I’ve no doubt about that being where their version of the song came from.’
Whatever the circumstances, you have to say the Eagles’ take, recorded for their Eagles Live album, is impeccable. According to Don Felder, when the Eagles first began playing stadiums the group would warm up pre-concert by singing Seven Bridges Road in a locker-room shower area. Each night would open with the group’s five members singing acapella into a single microphone. The song would later be replaced as show opener and show-stopper by Hotel California.
Composer Young, who died in Nashville 2016 at 73, wasn’t immediately impressed when the Eagles hit the charts with his song: ‘I thought it was too bluegrassy, too gospel. But the more I hear it, the better it sounds.’ He couldn’t believe how his humble tune had achieved such exposure.
It almost never made it on to Rock Salt & Nails. We can thank guitarist James Burton for recognising its quality when the album’s producer preferred interpretations of folk songs and country standards to original numbers. ‘Hey, this song sounds good and it is ready, let’s put it down,’ Burton said. The producer was soon convinced.
‘I wound up writing this song that I never dreamed anybody would even relate to, or understand,’ said Young. ‘I still don’t understand why it was so successful, and I don’t really know exactly what the song means. Consciously, I wrote about a girl and a road in south Alabama. But I think on another level the song has something kind of cosmic that registers in the subconscious: the number seven has all of these religious and mystical connotations.’
There are stars in the Southern sky
Southward as you go
There is moonlight and moss in the trees
Down the Seven Bridges Road
Now I have loved you like a baby
Like some lonesome child
And I have loved you in a tame way
And I have loved you wild
Sometimes there is a part of me
Has to turn from here and go
Running like a child beneath warm stars
Down the Seven Bridges Road
Seven Bridges Road would not have had the same cachet if its real name, Woodley Road, had been used. The nickname refers to seven wooden bridges along the rural two-lane thoroughfare in Montgomery county, three pairs and a single one a mile further south. ‘As you went out into the countryside the road became this dirt road, and you crossed seven bridges, and then it was almost like an old Disney scene or something, with these high bank dirt roads and trees hanging down, old cemeteries, and so on. It was very beautiful, and on a moonlit night it was exceedingly beautiful.’
Young’s old room-mate and later attorney general of Alabama, Jimmy Evans, had a sharper memory about the genesis of the song: ‘I’d go down Woodley Road to Orion a lot to listen to [bluesman] CP Austin. That road was a cavern of moss; it looked like a tunnel. One night when there was a full moon, we were in my Oldsmobile, and when I stopped Steve got out on the right-side fender. We sat there a while, and he started writing down words.’ Young completed his composition at their apartment that night.
Now there are stars in the Southern sky
And if ever you decide you should go
There is a taste of time-sweetened honey
Down the Seven Bridges Road
Young’s original ballad, lightly decorated by strings, is soulful and beautifully simple. The subtlety of the first change in each verse is oddly not replicated in the more famous versions. It took Iain Matthews, an original member of Fairport Convention who enjoyed a No1 single with Matthews Southern Comfort for their reimagining of Joni Mitchell’s anthem Woodstock, to realise its potential as a vocal masterpiece.
That arrangement, 52 years on, is lovingly honoured by the delightful harmonies of Track Dogs’ Garrett Wall, Dave Mooney, Howard Brown and Robbie K Jones with the on-board bonus of Matthews himself. Baartmans’ slide guitar emerges during the instrumental coda towards the end when a country-folk jam breaks out featuring acoustic guitar, bass, trumpet, banjo, mandolin and cajón.
We caught up with Matthews at the Sound Lounge in Sutton, Surrey, last year. His solo set did not include Seven Bridges Road, for obvious reasons, but impressive supporting duo Plumhall accompanied him on Woodstock, as did the delighted audience. The meandering career of Matthews, born Ian McDonald (with just the one i) and now based in the Netherlands, is worth retracing, from Fairport and the two lives of Plainsong with Andy Roberts to Hi-Fi, a Matthews Southern Comfort revival and Dutch combo The Searing Quartet. He continues to be a prolific songwriter as illustrated by his 2024 album How Much Is Enough; we heard the excellent It’s Complicated and The Bird And The Fish at the Sound Lounge.
Track Dogs, one of the finest live acts you could hope to see, are now celebrating their 20th anniversary with a tour entitled Still At The Music. A single by that name has been released. They returned to Madrid for the video and recreated their first photo shoot in the same spot. The sound is as intoxicating as their own brand of southern comfort about love on a road with seven bridges.
Days We Left Behind: Paul McCartney
It was a time for goosebumps and lumps in the throat. A visit to our home city of Liverpool to see family and old friends and scatter the last of mum’s ashes at the crematorium. Then we heard Paul McCartney’s evocative new single, Days We Left Behind, our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, and memories began to cascade.
My wife and I had just enjoyed a guided tour of Hill Dickinson Stadium, Everton’s new home, the highlight of which was replicating the walk the players take on to the pitch to the blare of that intimidating siren and the theme tune of Sixties television police series Z Cars. Spine-tingling.
So is Macca’s song, our first taste of his 18th solo album The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, due out on May 29. The former Beatle is now 83 and there are signs of frailty in the vocal. But they heighten the poignancy and authenticity. The lump is in his throat too as he recalls the early days of rock ’n’ roll dreams in the Speke area of Liverpool. ‘We didn’t have much at all,’ he says. Apart from talent and drive.
The nostalgic single supplies the title to his 14-track album, produced by Andrew Watt in studios in Los Angeles and Sussex and described as his most introspective yet, a collection of ‘rare and revealing glimpses into memories never before shared, along with some newly inspired love songs’. Personal milestones in a magical history tour.
Looking back at white and black
Reminders of my past
Smoky bars and cheap guitars
But nothing built to last
Nothing ever stays
Nothing comes to mind
No one can erase
The days we left behind
See the boys of Dungeon Lane
Along the Mersey shore
Some of them will feel the pain
But some were meant for more
And nothing stays the same
No one needs to cry
Nothing can reclaim
The days we left behind
Everton now have a stadium fit for the modern age, corporate boxes to fund the next Grealish or even this one, the opportunity to stage international matches, Olympic and Commonwealth Games showpieces, rugby and boxing events, and of course rock concerts. There were rumours before Everton’s farewell to their beloved Goodison Park that McCartney might appear in a show there; now speculation is rising that it could happen at the new home. Goodbye, hello.
It would be so apt. Macca is from a Blues-supporting family, his father having been born in the district of Everton. The Beatles weren’t avid football followers and had to be careful not to alienate any fans in the city. McCartney the blue diplomat once told the Observer: ‘If it comes down to a derby match or an FA Cup final between the two, I would have to support Everton. But after a concert at Wembley Arena I made a bit of a friendship with Kenny Dalglish, who had been to the gig, and I thought: You know what? I am just going to support them both because it’s all Liverpool and I don’t have that Catholic-Protestant thing. I did have to get special dispensation from the Pope to do this but that’s it, too bad. I support them both. But if it comes to the crunch, I’m Evertonian.’
As one Liverpool fan put it, just let it be. An Everton devotee, Above Us Only Sky, posted a video of the new arena in night-time dockland splendour to the soundtrack of Days We Left Behind. It is a pity there is no acknowledgement of the stadium we left behind. One wag left a comment: ‘When I find myself in times of trouble, Paul McCartney comes to me.’ Macca will be 84 in June; he may have to tweak that Sgt Pepper song.
A Hill Dickinson concert as McCartney surely thinks about winding down his global playing career would give the excellent guides on our pilgrimage extra material. Those Beatles tours that run from the Albert Dock may now have to include the Dungeon Lane stretch to the Speke shoreline near the airport that would later bear the name of Macca’s equally famous old mucker.
Paul’s old house in Forthlin Road, which is a tour landmark and where his writing alliance with John Lennon was forged, is mentioned in the song. McCartney’s melodic gifts are as strong as ever with a lovely descending piano and acoustic guitar hook and a breathtaking bridge…
We met at Forthlin Road
And wrote a secret code
To never be spoken
I stand by what I said
The promise that I made
Will never be broken
That code might be referring to the Lennon-McCartney bond. I am even prepared to ignore the split infinitive. There are echoes of post-war Liverpool in the final verse and the stirrings of teenage history-making.
In the skies the skylarks rise
Above the sounds of war
Since that day I knew they’d stay
With me for evermore
As we scattered mum’s ashes, I recalled as a youngster asking her if I could go to see a band called The Beatles who were playing a bus ride away at Litherland Town Hall. It would have been post-Hamburg and pre-Ringo. Only lemonade and crisps were on the sale but she still said No. Eventually I would understand why and forgave her for the lost opportunity. I was only 10 or 11 and didn’t have a ticket to ride anyway.
By the time I was working and could afford to attend gigs, the Fab Four had long left Liverpool and would soon be no more. As the Fab One sings:
’Cause nothing stays the same
And no one needs to cry
And no one is to blame
For the days we left behind
Atlas: Katherine Priddy
One word was on repeat when Katherine Priddy met Guy Garvey in his favourite pub for a YouTube discussion about the making of her latest album, These Frightening Machines: beautiful. It takes a fine lyricist to know what it takes to produce songs and words this memorable, and the Elbow singer has long been a champion and aficionado of her work.
Apart from a couple of upbeat tracks, her third album has a quiet majesty with songs of nostalgia, reflection, love, mortality, longing and belonging. Priddy maintains her fascination for figures of classical mythology with the gorgeous Atlas, our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com. The man who was forced to carry the universe on his shoulders is used as a metaphor for a Priddy acquaintance who was struggling but was too proud to admit it and seek help.
The Birmingham-born songwriter’s empathy and elegant vocal shine through as the track unfolds to reveal a poignant chorus…
Oh, you were once a river rising
Everything was weightless
Driftwood in your flow
And now you’ve wound up in the ocean
Caught up in a current
Sinking like a stone
You were not made to give without taking
Don’t be afraid to say that your back is breaking
You don’t have to do this on your own
Oh Atlas lay down your burden
The weight of your love, you’ve taken enough, just let it all fall
Oh Atlas who’s there to hold you?
Alone in the darkness, standing in silence, you carry it all
Say you’re tired and let me take you home
Priddy, an English literature graduate, has beguiled us with her classical references before: Icarus and especially Eurydice were standout tracks on her sparkling debut album, The Eternal Rocks Beneath, five years ago. Priddy told Garvey that Atlas proved the most difficult on the album to complete; she thought it was too plodding at first. But producer and multi-instrumentalist Rob Ellis suggested a couple of subtle changes and sprinkled his magic dust. And the rest was ancient history.
I asked my cousin Paul Murgatroyd, a retired classics professor, to expand on the Atlas legend. His reply was more entertaining than Wikipedia: Atlas’s burden was a deserved punishment. He was one of the Giants who made war on the Olympian gods and for that was forced by Zeus to support the vault of the sky on his shoulders. As one of his Labours Heracles had to fetch the Golden Apples of the Hesperides. Bit of a problem as he didn’t know where their garden was, in which the apples grew. But Atlas did. So Heracles offered to hold up the sky for Atlas if he would nip off and fetch the apples. Atlas obliged but when he returned thought he was being clever and refused to take over his sky duties again. Heracles pretended to accept that, but claimed his shoulders were sore and asked Atlas if he would take over for a second while he slipped a cushion over them to ease the load. Atlas fell for it, and Heracles legged it with the apples, leaving Atlas with his burden again. So Atlas was an impious sinner and a blockhead to boot.
Back to the making of These Frightening Machines. Priddy tells us: ‘If the first album was for building a foundation, and the second was about reinforcing what I’d already begun, the third album felt to me like a chance to be bolder, push out and try something new.’ The arrangements and instrumentation are more ambitious than 2024’s The Pendulum Swing. A good example is the bossa nova-swaying Hurricane, a nod to Dusty Springfield’s Spooky.
‘At its core, I think These Frightening Machines explores the ever shifting relationship I have with my sense of self as a woman, my body and my place in the world as a 30- year-old artist – but I’d like to think that while the songs are born from personal experience, the feelings expressed are widely relatable.’
None more relatable than the closing track about a doomed relationship, Could This Be Enough? ‘I wanted to end the album on a question mark as, while I’d have hoped to have it all figured out by the third album and my third decade, I’ve come to accept that perhaps part of being human is being a perpetual work in progress. Could this collection of songs be enough? If it strikes a match and casts a little light for anyone who has ever felt their body falter, their love waver, or time slip through their fingers, then that’s enough for me.’ Leave your audience hanging without resorting to lazy resolutions: that was the advice of university lecturers about her English essays.
Garvey’s admiration for her poetic lyrics is at full power here. On the tender A Matter Of Time, a meditation on the fragility of life, she writes: ‘A decade swings by like the sand that keeps slipping through hands that once cradled mine.’ On Madeleine, where she is joined by American singer-songwriter Torres, she bemoans the lot of the female artist: ‘It’s an art how they keep our names apart/ But stick us on a bill with 20 men who play guitar.’
A tattoo on the neck of a festival goer (Women Not Witches) was the inspiration for ‘They weren’t burning witches/ It was women on those fires’ on the incendiary opener Matches. She transforms the lost voices of the horrific witch trials into an empowering call to arms with the chilling warning: ‘Don’t they know that we have matches too?’ Then there is the candour and vulnerability of the title track, written after a spell in hospital surrounded by frightening machines: ‘I’m betrayed by this thing I can’t change/ A passenger at my own wheel/ It’s hard to be tied to a body that tried/ To erase what I needed to feel.’
Table Four, about a real table four in a pub in Pembrokeshire where Priddy spent an evening chatting to two fellow musicians about the rigours of touring, reflects on the constant pull of home: ‘Everywhere I’ve gone I’ve had a small town on my mind/ You can try to run from where you come from/ But you can’t leave it behind.’
But it was the hushed, almost acapella outro of Could This Be Enough? that stopped Garvey in his tracks. He’d love to have composed the last couplet himself.
I have seen how hearts can splinter
Love can’t always last the winter
If only we were evergreen
Instead of August’s fever dream
Time to use that word again: beautiful.
Down The Line: Dirk Powell
On the home page of his website, Appalachian roots artist Dirk Powell displays a treasured testimonial from an admirer accustomed to receiving such plaudits himself. Steve Earle waxes lyrical: ‘Dirk Powell is a badass. To the bone. He is, in addition to being the greatest old-time banjo player alive, a graduate student of both mountain and Cajun fiddle styles, and diatonic button accordion. He is a singer, songwriter, producer, recording engineer and, all in all, an artist of unique vision and unbending integrity.’
If any confirmation were needed, the Ohio-born musician from a family with deep Kentucky roots will release Wake, his first solo album since 2020, on April 17. He has shared its evocative first single, Down The Line, our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, a train journey from his home in Lafayette, Louisiana, through the heartlands of his itinerant life and career.
The 56-year-old Powell is widely referred to as a ‘musician’s musician’. His artistry is grounded in the hills of Appalachia and the bayous of Louisiana, where he learned banjo, fiddle, and accordion from his grandfather and community elders. Among the guest appearances on the album are his daughters Amelia and Sophie Powell, Rhiannon Giddens, Darrell Scott and Kai Welch.
The video for the down-home Down The Line, premiered by Bluegrass Situation, features rural imagery of Powell’s beloved Louisiana, footage he shot himself. The American describes the track beautifully: ‘Softly rolling banjos, stark guitars, and distant fiddles paint pictures of journeys from my home in Louisiana through places that have inspired me to lay everything on the line – and given me settings in which to do so. West. South. I’ll take either one, but both at once makes the blood rise in my chest. To feel the moisture of the Gulf give way to chaparral, then to scrubby plains, and finally to the bright desert. Danger and its opposite.’
Going down to Houston Town
Don’t you wanna go
Catch the first thing smokin’
We’ll head for Mexico
Down in Laredo
There I’ll make my stand
Dollar in my pocket
Future in my hand
Out in El Paso
I’ll see what I can find
Look across the border
Lord, ease my worried mind
I’m going to California
Never coming back
I’ll find a piece of heaven
Along some railroad track
Powell has toured extensively with artists such as Joan Baez, Eric Clapton, Rhiannon Giddens, Loretta Lynn, Irma Thomas, Jack White, Linda Ronstadt, Buddy Miller, Levon Helm, T-Bone Burnett and his champion Earle. On film soundtracks, he has collaborated with directors Anthony Minghella (Cold Mountain), Ang Lee (Ride With The Devil), Edward Burns (The Brothers McMullen) and Spike Lee (Bamboozled). He has contributed to many Grammy-winning projects across folk, country, blues and rock. Since the 1990s, his own recordings have continued to shape a new generation of traditional musicians and songwriters.
His most celebrated composition, Waterbound, from his 2004 album Time Again, has been recorded over 100 times. I first saw him playing it with the Transatlantic Sessions, the recording and performance project of dobro maestro Jerry Douglas and fiddler Ali Bain, at London’s Festival Hall. Down The Line, with its chugging groove, is bound to be heavily covered too.
As a producer, Powell has an alchemist’s touch, practised in his own studio, The Cypress House, a converted 1850s Louisiana Creole house. His collaboration with Irish singer-songwriter Heidi Talbot on her 2022 album, Sing It For A Lifetime, is memorable, and his work with Giddens on Songs Of Our Native Daughters ground-breaking. The latter shone new light on African-American women’s tales of struggle, resistance and hope. Inspired by narratives of enslaved people, Giddens and her fellow banjo players Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell reinterpret old songs and create powerful new ones such as Russell’s lovely You’re Not Alone. With Powell as a co-driver, they confront sanitised views about America’s history of slavery, racism, and misogyny from a black female perspective.
Powell has maintained a strong bond with Tim O’Brien, resulting in acclaimed recordings such as Songs From The Mountain, also featuring John Herrmann, and founded Cajun group Balfa Toujours with his wife Christine Balfa. Powell is touring in the lead-up to Wake’s awakening with daughter Amelia, and will also perform alongside Giddens on various dates throughout the year.
Powell never forgets what he learned as a teenager from his grandfather, James Clarence Hay. ‘When I play now, I bring Papaw back. Or, rather, I call the spirit that has never really left to come and join me. I might stand in front of thousands in a concert hall, or slouch on some carpeted stage in a low-ceilinged honky tonk, or sit in the dark corner of a pub along a foreign coast. Wherever I am, I know that Papaw, gifted musician that he was, never got the chance to do any of it. To live any one of the nights I experience regularly would have been an indescribable treasure to him.’
For 10 years Powell played in Joan Baez’s band. She said of him: ‘God gave this one an overdose of talent.’ It is hoped even more music fans will savour those pieces of heaven he sings about. Down The Line is pulling in to a platform near you.
A Rainy Night In Soho: Bruce Springsteen
I took shelter from a shower And I stepped into your arms On a rainy night in Soho The wind was whistling all its charms
As musical tributes go, it could not have been more tender. Bruce Springsteen’s faithful rendition of Shane MacGowan’s ballad A Rainy Night In Soho is the first single to be unveiled from a forthcoming album in memory of the Pogues frontman and our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com.
MacGowan died aged 65 in November, 2023, after a long illness. Springsteen and The E Street Band performed A Rainy Night in Soho – from the Pogues’ 1986 EP Poguetry In Motion produced by Elvis Costello – at three shows in Ireland in May 2024 as did Bob Dylan in Dublin last year. Lisa O’Neill has sung it on the re-formed Pogues tour. MacGowan’s delivery in the original was typically jaunty; The Boss opts for a subdued, reverential rasp.
The tribute album – 20th Century Paddy: The Songs of Shane MacGowan – is scheduled for November 13 and will also include performances from the surviving members of The Pogues, Tom Waits, Steve Earle, The High Kings, Hozier with Jessie Buckley, Johnny Depp with Imelda May, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Dropkick Murphys, Glen Hansard, Lisa O’Neill, The Libertines, David Gray, Primal Scream, Damien Dempsey, Johnny Mac & the Faithful, Lisa Moorish & Another Day, Picture This, Pinch of Snuff and The Murder Capital.
‘Shane was all naked bottomless humanity, threatening to force us to ask ourselves if we were living deeply, authentically,’ Springsteen says. ‘He was raw, hilarious, no apologies and profound. His soul was filled with the transgressive and ecstatic properties of the saints.’
The American recalled the precious time he shared with MacGowan: ‘Though I did not know Shane very well, I spent a lovely afternoon in his presence shortly before he passed. He was not well but he and his wife Victoria proved warm and gracious hosts. As I left, I thanked him for his beautiful work, his music, his songs, his life. I stood in his warmth, kissed him and told him I loved him.’
Half of royalties from the album will be donated to the homelessness organisation Dublin Simon Community. MacGown’s last public performance was in 2021 at the Christmas Eve Busk in Dublin to raise funds for the charity, and since then, one of his songs has been played at the Busk each year in his honour. ‘Shane was a long‑time supporter of our work,’ said the CEO Catherine Kenny. ‘His empathy for people sleeping rough in Dublin was well known; he never hesitated to stop, acknowledge, and share a moment with someone on the street.’
In his introduction to the album Springsteen places MacGowan in a musical lineage of ‘natural rebels’. He writes: ‘Every once in a great while an artist comes along whose voice seems to speak to history itself. Woody Guthrie, Jimmy Rogers, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Miles Davis, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, John Coltrane, Patti Smith, James Brown, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, John Lydon, Hank Williams, Sinatra. Geniuses all, they were both timeless and the embodiment of their moment in time. Many, unsurprisingly, led difficult lives not easily bound by the shackles of convention. They were natural rebels unable to stifle or heed the impulses that led them to their glory and personal hardships.
‘Great art is by nature lawless. We do not get to choose our obsessions. We do not get to dictate our blessings or our transgressions. It’s a little joke the gods play on us. Shane’s voice was so deeply real, profane and honest, his writing so flashing, alive and historically rich its genesis appeared as a mystery to all including, I believe, its creator. The dangerous joy, the glee and courage, the humour in the face of fate, the wild ramble of a life driven towards the artistic heavens and the daily balm of self-obliteration.’
Kent-born MacGowan grew up in London, the son of Irish emigrants, later making Dublin his home. He fused punk, traditional folk and other influences with the Pogues and other collaborations that blended rebellion and nostalgia. At his funeral in Tipperary the family danced to his most celebrated composition Fairytale Of New York, sung by Hansard and O’Neill. Nick Cave performed the song he had earlier recorded, A Rainy Night In Soho, saying: ‘Shane was not revered just for his manifold talents but also loved for himself alone. A beautiful and damaged man, who embodied a kind of purity and innocence and generosity and spiritual intelligence unlike any other.’
MacGowan was lauded as a poet, lyricist, singer and trailblazer at the mass. His sister, Siobhan, said that despite growing up in England her brother’s ‘veins ran deep with Irish blood’, and he found his spiritual home in Tipperary. In her eulogy, his widow Victoria Mary Clarke described him as ‘a genius and a beautiful soul’. He would have been 66 on Christmas Day.
Springsteen and Ron Aniello co-produced A Rainy Night in Soho. They both play keyboards on the track with Aniello contributing bass and drums. They are joined by four horn players: Curt Ramm (trumpet), Barry Danielian (trumpet, flugelhorn), Bill Holloman (tenor saxophone) and Ozzie Melendez (trombone). There are seven verses and an infectious piano hook; a chorus would have been an unnecessary embellishment.
I’ve been loving you a long time
Down all the years and all the days
And I’ve cried for all your troubles
Smiled at your funny little ways
We watched our friends grow up together
And we saw them as they fell
Some of them fell into Heaven
Some of them fell into Hell…
Sometimes I’d wake up in the morning
The ginger lady by my bed
Covered in a cloak of silence
I’d hear you talking in my head
Now I’m not singing for the future
And I’m not dreaming of the past
I’m not talking of the first times
I never think about the last
Asked about the song by The Quietus in a 2012 interview, MacGowan remarked: ‘I’ve seen ghosts behind me in period costume dictating songs on a couple of occasions. A Rainy Night In Soho was automatic writing. I had no idea what it was about. I had a vague idea by the time I got to the fourth verse but until then I hadn’t got a clue what was going on.’
In the song he is grateful to have somehow avoided the trapdoors his friends slipped through. The ginger lady by his bed is thought to be a reference to alcohol as he laments a lost love whose memory still sustained him…
And now the song is nearly over
We may never find out what it means
Still there’s a light I hold before me
You’re the measure of my dreams
Springsteen commented: ‘I don’t know who’ll be listening to my music in 100 years but I know they’ll be listening to Shane’s.’ He should not worry on that score. The bigger concern is whether this planet of ours lasts that long.
Break The Jaw: Madison Cunningham
Watching Madison Cunningham flit from piano to various guitars with Jesse Chandler as a multi-tasking sidekick, it was hard to believe we weren’t hearing a full band. Her show at Shepherd’s Bush Theatre was a jazz-infused tour de force with her latest album Ace high on the agenda. Here was a songwriter stretching the boundaries of risk, musically and emotionally, her stately voice the most wondrous instrument of all.
The challenging songs on the album were written towards the end of 2024 in the wake of a traumatic divorce. Following their move from Orange County in California to Los Angeles, the daughter of a pastor and the teenage sweetheart she met at church had decided to part after five years of marriage. We are spared the details but the pain seeps through every line. Ace is a diary of a fracturing relationship with chapters on true love, vulnerability, heartache, disillusion and forgiveness.
Break The Jaw, our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, emerged from a band jam with its compelling rhythms and lyrically feels like a dispatch from the eye of a personal storm.
I’m walking around
Dragging along
A heart wide open
As a broken jaw
And it’s never been so quiet
In the pressure machine…
I put my weight in your arms and I fell right through
I may never forgive you
You may never forgive me
We may never forgive each other
But I may never, I may never
Forgive myself
I abandon my post
And you pick at the latch
You can’t find the heart
So you lean on the craft
But broken people
Don’t have to break people too
Cunningham has been described as the musician’s musician so players in the room might have found this song jaw-droppingly impressive. We prefer to be more inclusive and regard her as the discerning listener’s musician. Ace is not as accessible as her 2022 Grammy-winning record, Revealer, and more introspective than its predecessor, from which she selected Life According To Raechel as a solo encore at Shepherd’s Bush. This gorgeous love letter to her grandmother is a former Song of the Week here.
On our latest choice Break The Jaw, Cunningham’s jagged, jazzy guitar displays chamber pop dramatics typical of the off-kilter melodies beloved of Rufus and Martha Wainwright. We thought Skeletree (‘Did I get your love/ At the cost of my mind?’) could not be surpassed for its swaying intensity and storytelling heft but Break The Jaw takes us as deep into her dismantling as we are entitled to travel.
Elsewhere the Californian achieves an almost classical sophistication in beautiful ballads such as Shore, the Joni-esque Take Two and My Full Name. The young Madison was experimenting with open tunings before she discovered Joni Mitchell; secular sounds took time to woo her away from the constrictions of megachurch worship music. All of her third studio album was written in the tuning of CGDFAC, which offered infinite sonic possibilities, and played mainly on the gift of a piano from her father.
Cunningham is celebrated for her indie folk guitar virtuosity but piano was the instrument she mastered first as a youngster and Ace is largely a piano-led collection of songs. ‘I wanted to play guitar more like a pianist,’ she told Bluegrass Situation. To her, tone is everything, and co-producer Robbie Lackritz helped achieve the goal.
On tour the stage has been illuminated to appear as if she and Chandler are performing underwater amid a set of marshy reeds and rocks. Chandler, whose playing and arrangements contribute artfully to the new album, floats subtly between clarinet, flute, saxes and other instruments as well as synth and loops.
That submerged setting, used by her for a solo video of Break The Jaw, seemed apt for the most memorable image of My Full Name, the album’s lead single…
There’s a water leak the size of Berlin
Coming from this vessel that we’re in
Running from my eyes to your chin
Love’s a kind of sorrow worth saving
Wake, her duet with Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, who she calls ‘the king of harmonies’, is a conversation between partners nearing the end of their relationship. ‘Robin’s voice is just like a warm fire.’ The track, the first she wrote in that alternate tuning, contains her favourite lines on the record. Devastating lines too…
As the grand illusion frays
It hits me as I drive away
I’ll never see your hair go grey
Her approach to melody is fearlessly innovative, the candour of her lyrics unflinching. ‘It’s been a really challenging record to live inside of,’ she told Line Of Best Fit. ‘I just didn’t think that it was still going to hold all of this emotional weight, and it really does. They’re still alive in me, almost like radiation or something left over from a big explosion. It feels like there are a lot of landmines around talking about this record and living with it.’
At 29 Cunningham has survived a period of turbulence – married young, divorced young – normally experienced by people much older than her. Instead of retreating, she turned the ordeal into a meditation on the difference between happiness and contentment. ‘Happiness is hollow and shiny, contentment is rooted and rich and doesn’t deny sadness or joy,’ she told Leo Sidran on his Third Story podcast. ‘We want to numb pain away and that just means you numb eveything else too. Contentment isn’t afraid of the feeling of pain.’
Resilience and hope arrive in the shape of the album’s graceful closing track Best Of Us. ‘Who gave up first?/ That depends on who is lying/ Maybe the best of us are only good at trying.’ She acknowledges that the relationship is over, but the burden no longer feels calamitous. ‘I’m learning how to be alone and to not feel loneliness. Those don’t have to be the same thing.’ Like the word Ace, it has more than one meaning. Low or high, the suit has to be hearts.