Songs of the Week 2026: Take 4
- 3 days ago
- 17 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Neil Morton
FEATURED SONG OF THE WEEK
Really Real: Allison Russell (featuring Norah Jones)
The joy of collaboration is writ large on the face of Allison Russell as she is joined by special guest Norah Jones on her third studio album, In The Hour Of Chaos. Really Real, our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, is a soulful standout as the two musicians trade verses and weave their magical harmonies into the fabric of the track.
The Montreal-born Russell, whose traumatic early life was explored on this website after the release of her outstanding debut album Outside Child in 2021, feels safe and secure, empowered by her uplifting music created in the company of friends she calls her Rainbow Coalition. In The Hour Of Chaos is overflowing with collaborations: Brittney Spencer, Denitia, Kara Jackson, Joy Oladokun, Julie Williams, Ruby Amanfu, Kyshona, Sara Watkins, Devon Gilfillian, Kashus Kulpepper, Chibueze Ihuoma, Ahya Simone – and even a school pop choir Explore! featuring her daughter Ida.
But it is the Nashville-based Russell’s impassioned voice that thrills us most no matter how hard she tries to deflect attention in the name of community and connection, a cause she has fervently promoted to combat troubled times and any demons that may be lingering.
Well you’ve seen me in my power,
And you’ve seen me black and blue
You been there the whole ride
Been through all the lows & highs
And you never spoke nothin’ but the truth
But when the truth was so cold
You held it by the firelight for me
Let me sleep easy till the morning
Where’s your way-back-true-fact-really-real-one?
Who’s gonna be your shelter from the storm?
Don’t forget one day they gonna need some
They gonna need a little shelter of their own
Her mission on the album is to ‘reverse the tides that pull us further and further apart – it is meant to make you feel good and, in these times, feeling good is a radical act’. She advocates ‘connection in the face of alienation, isolation and dread’. As one admirer put it, ‘this is protest music but with its arms wide open; joy as resistance and music as medicine’.
Really Real is an expression of gratitude to the people who stand by our sides during the difficult moments. On her popular Playing Along Podcast, recorded before their album duet was tracked, pianist Jones told her banjo- and clarinet-playing guest that she favoured singing the second verse on the record and promotional video whereas Russell thought she should open; Jones obviously got her way. When Norah breezes in, the sense of warmth deepens such is the relaxed tone of her jazz-tinged delivery.
Well I don’t know how to pray, love
So I write these songs for you
I’ve been driving while you sleep
You put all that weight on me
And you never see my indigo mood
But when my eyes grow so tired
Will you take the wheel away from me
Let me sleep easy till the morning?
In The Hour Of Chaos was recorded in Nashville and produced by Russell and the team known as Dim Star (her writing and life partner JT Nero and Drew Lindsay). Perhaps for her next offering Russell might consider returning to the splendid isolation of Outside Child and its starker arrangements. Her voice sometimes requires more space to cast its spell.
We are not complaining; the teamwork works wonders. The French Canadian’s generosity of spirit is boundless as the healing process becomes more distant from those dark younger days of abuse at the hands of a white supremacist stepfather. She became a teenage runaway in Montreal – it was run or die. Cold April sounds like a sunny pop song but it contains a biting, politically-charged message: ‘There’s not enough bullets, not enough guns/ They can kill the bird but not the birdsong.’
Oh I already know sometimes to grow, you break first
I learned it from my father way back when I was child
Promises vanish in the dark, 99 ways he crushed my heart
But he couldn’t make it bitter cause we took back the night
Birds are a common image for this former member of the duo Birds Of Chicago: ‘Calling all birds from across the nation/ Yeah, we got a brand new murmuration/ We don’t gotta fly in your old formation, no!’ Chaos Theory provides the album title: ‘In the hour of chaos, in the hour of despair/ You’re gonna feel my love coming down.’
Black Lavender, in which she cedes lead vocal to the formidable Brittney Spencer, is a celebration of resilience, the quality we most associate with Russell. Ahya Simone’s harp washes over album closer Good Omens with Russell’s dreamy vocal leaving us with the overriding message of hope. Hope and joy in the company of soulmates.
Trying To Love You: Sierra Ferrell
Sierra Ferrell’s effortless melding of influences old and new continues to astound. Trying To Love You, her new single and our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, manages to bridge different the eras from mountain music to Gram Parsons-tinged alt-country. Little wonder she calls herself a genre bender.
Trying To Love You has been a favourite of the Heavy Petal Tour she has used to promote her last album Trail Of Flowers, which garnered four Grammy awards last year. Ferrell, born in Charleston, West Virginia, and now based in Nashville, loves flowers and the stage, as well as our star performer, has been garlanded by them.
Old-time country music has its bigoted, ultra-conservative supporters so she has had to ignore their advice that her music would be better appreciated if she removed the nose and lip rings, the gold tooth and the tattoos. She is on a mission to change attitudes and broaden minds as much as she has expanded her stage wardrobe and eclectic repertoire, which ranges from bluegrass to burlesque, traditional folk to psychedelia.
‘I’m just trying to put words and melodies together and build it into something people can pour their feelings, all their happiness and sorrows, so that it changes their reality a little bit and gives them some comfort,’ the roots musician says. ‘To me music is like medicine. And whenever I write a song and it feels healing to me, I know it can heal other people too.’
The new track, on her pet theme of love slipping through her hands, showcases her penchant for surprising us with unexpected sonic leaps, her upper-register vocal gymnastics impressing us with its emotional depth. It was heartbreak that pushed her into songwriting, we recall her telling us.
Remember me gentle
Remember me kind
Remember me sweet
Remember me nice
Before I tried to love you
You say you’re a good man
But are you doing all you can
I watch you slippin’ through my hands
I’m just trying to get back home
Get back home
It’s a fine line
Trying to love you
It’s a fine line
So fine
Just trying to love you
The musicianship is exquisite: polymath producer Gabriel Kelley on piano, Wurlitzer, guitars and percussion, Billy Contreras on fiddle, Pat Bergeson on harmonica, Viktor Krauss on bass, drummer Matty Meyer with Kelley joined by Oliver Bates Craven, Geoff Saunders and Joshua Rilko on backing vocals. Ferrell’s own beautifully otherworldly voice is one for the ages.
All styles of music have made the 38-year-old fiddler and guitarist more rounded. When her parents divorced, she lived on a trailer park listening to her mother’s 10,000 Maniacs and Tracy Chapman cassettes. She left home in her early twenties to criss-cross the country with a group of itinerant musicians, playing everywhere from truck stops to freight-train boxcars, invoking her inner Woody Guthrie. Shania Twain’s hits were revisited in dive bars and there was a stint with a Grateful Dead covers band. It was a chaotic and at times dangerous journey, a real-time movie screenplay.
After years of living in a van and busking on the streets of Seattle and New Orleans, the nomad moved to Nashville and eventually landed a deal with Rounder Records on the strength of her sparkling live performances. She tells a story of being arrested for vagrancy in Asheville, North Carolina, after sleeping under a bridge. She told the judge she was a busker and sang for a living. He asked her to demonstrate; when she rattled off verses of Steve Earle’s The Mountain, the courtroom erupted in applause. ‘That’s how music can win people over.’
Since the acclaimed Long Time Coming in 2021, there have been countless collaborations: with Ray LaMontagne, Zach Bryan, Margo Price, Old Crow Medicine Show, Post Malone, the Brudi Brothers, The Black Keys, Billy Strings, Lukas Nelson, Shakey Graves and Mumford & Sons. Unplugged, she and her band delighted their audience at the NPR Tiny Desk, decked out like a flower stall.
On the Eddie Spear-produced Trail Of Flowers, Ferrell revealed the blossoming of her imaginative storytelling. She is touring North America now after shows in Europe and the UK. She knows how to please a crowd: Wonderwall in Manchester, a Beatles cover in Hamburg. But it is her own relatable, soulful songs which resonated more powerfully: American Dreaming, a meditation on life in a van and dark days fuelled by drink and drugs, is marinaded in Brandi (Carlile); Dollar Bill Bar is a bluesy, singalong winner; Fox Hunt is a nod to a string band she enjoyed on her travels and a vehicle for her fiery fiddle work; and I Could Drive You Crazy gloriously channels her mountain music roots.
Ferrell expanded on her self-appointed role as a healer to Variety’s Chris Willman: ‘I want to be a part of the solution. People today don’t look at years down the road. We’re so self-serving and stuck in our heads, we’re like egomaniacs. I just think that we need a better infrastructure; we need better leaders. I want to be a part of a brighter future for our children.’ A champion for the marginalised, as she once was.
Trying To Love You signals an even brighter musical future for Ferrell and her fans.
All My Faith: Maya de Vitry
A celebration of life and love sounds like just what the world needs now, and Nashville-based indie folk and alt-country artist Maya de Vitry has provided it with her fifth album All My Faith. The title track, our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, is a buoyant expression of her belief in the power of song to change.
Hailing from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Maya de Vitry is a Nashville-based fiddler turned singer-guitarist with a crystalline voice that is tender yet authoritative. These are live performances of songs written over the last year and brought to life by a cast of her closest confidantes, recorded over three days at a studio called The Tractor Shed in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, in November last year. All was captured in real time, with no digital tweaks.
Prioritising grit over studio polish, de Vitry opted to trust in the spontaneous choices of the players and singers gathered around her. We are made to feel we are in the room with them. ‘When the band realised that I was planning to do no edits whatsoever on these tracks, the level of commitment from everyone just soared. It was a really exciting atmosphere in the studio.
‘I love how you can really hear the aliveness of people just jamming together. The way the band grooves as Joel Timmons and I sing Some parts of me are rotting was elevating as it happened in real time, and it still gets me when I listen back now.’
Take one lap around the gallery
God is a surrealist
And breath is just as brief
For the fearful and the fearless
I love how there is an hourglass
Inside of everybody
How there’s parts of me alive
And some parts of me are rotting
And how blood’s a sign of living
And also a sign of dying
And the headwaters of laughter
Are the headwaters of crying
I want to touch time with all my faith
I want to let you in with all my faith
‘From jotting down song ideas in a river canyon (or in the woods or while hiking) to walking into the recording studio, I was nurturing self-acceptance as my North Star. I can observe other people all day long but have been afraid to write about my own heart in such detail – opening up about my relationship with my partner and my relationship with touring. I also wanted real self-acceptance in my singing, and I
wanted all the other musicians in the room to understand just how much I trusted and accepted their instincts.’
Her earlier years are represented by four albums and two EPs with roots trio The Stray Birds before she launched her solo career with her 2019 album Adaptations. Since then, she has released three more full-length offerings, How to Break a Fall (2020), Violet Light (2022) and The Only Moment (2024); an EP, Infinite (2023); and a clutch of singles.
All My Faith is her fifth dimension. ‘I’d like my music to feel like you are invited into a lush living forest or into a remote river canyon where suddenly you are stripped of not only modern conveniences but also modern distractions. Where you can feel the essence of your own humanity and those around you. Where suddenly a stranger’s story becomes interesting, or where you might choose teamwork and problem-solving and creativity over dogma. Where reciprocity and care start to feel more natural than just about anything else.’
These are broad-brush themes but it is the intimate moments of her pin-sharp observational powers that surprise and delight:
Picking mint by the handful
Huckleberry-stained ankles
I want the kind of love that
We can never untangle…
Maybe a possum or a train
Or rolling over in the moonlight
In the green river lakes
Or wrapped around you in the rafters
In the Adirondack rain
De Vitry explained the album’s ethos: the healing and wisdom that emerge from our relationships – with each other and the natural world. ‘Faith is woven into the fabric of my life in music – faith in what is possible in a relationship when I am the truest version of myself, faith in strangers opening their hearts to my songs, faith in this wild idea that sharing stories of our shared human condition can pull us toward compassion and gratitude. We’re just these hungry and thirsty bodies wandering this planet in our brief and intersecting lifetimes, and I have faith in how we can be each others’ keepers, each others’ teachers. I’m finding a new faith in imperfection. I’m living this faith that love – real, nuanced, imperfect love – is so worthy an endeavour.’
I saw a heart-shaped lake
I saw a heart-shaped cloud
I will not let the beauty
Go slipping by me now
The emotional depth of her lyrics and vocal delivery is evident in other standouts: Traveller about her beloved departed grandmother (‘She still let me play with her hair/ We made it a crown, silver and thin’); Coin In Your Soul, inspired by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado; Nobody Else, a tangled love story; and the gorgeous Confidence Of The Sun, her redemption song written during a songwriting residency in Texas (‘It took me a long time to recognise/ Peace as a place I belong/ I’d pick up my mistakes like kindling/ Put on armour just to talk’).
She told Bluegrass Situation of Confidence Of The Sun: ‘It felt healing just to sing it and own that truth. It’s taken years for me to begin to rewire some painful patterns, some deep grooves of self-doubt and self-sabotage. For anyone who has ever been through periods of interpersonal chaos, times of loud endings and quiet beginnings, an era of coming back to honesty in your body and spirit after going through the motions – it can be hard to actually see and feel and appreciate in your bones just how far we’ve come?’ She talked of resting her voice in Dom Billett’s drum groove.
For All My Faith De Vitry enlisted Spencer Cullum on wonderful pedal steel and glittering guitarist Ethan Ballinger, both members of Miranda Lambert’s touring group, alongside Jo Schornikow on keyboards. They are joined by regular members of her live band: her partner Ethan Jodziewicz on bass, Billett on drums and Shelby Means and Joel Timmons on harmony vocals.
Following solo dates in Europe and the UK, de Vitry and her band are about to tour North America. ‘After the show, I just want to know if I’ve helped you feel more free,’ she says. ‘That’s my unspoken agreement – to myself, my bandmates, and everyone in the audience.’
As Maya de Vitry consistently demonstrates, her music can be so liberating.
Fotheringay: Josienne Clarke
Josienne Clarke’s exquisite cover of a Sandy Denny classic, Fotheringay, is our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com. As Clarke says, an entire world is contained within its three and a half minutes. ‘It could be an historical novel, play or painting, such is the vivid nature of its imagery.’
The tale of the incarceration of Mary Queen of Scots at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire following a failed attempt to overthrow her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, is beautifully interpreted by a songwriter who was told when she was 17 she had a voice like Denny’s. We are easily able to enjoy the original Fairport Convention track and this reimagining just as much.
The song is a meditation on the final hours of her 19-year imprisonment rather than the execution.
Our explanation of the song’s meaning and its relevance to Denny herself could not rival Clarke’s own eloquence: ‘The melancholia in Fotheringay isn't just passive sadness. It is the heavy, quiet dignity of a woman who has accepted her fate but refuses to let anyone else dictate how she meets it. Sandy wrote it as a young woman on the cusp of the rest of her life, and it carries a heavy, prophetic weight.
‘Despite being surrounded by guards, courtiers, and a literal kingdom, Mary was utterly alone. Even when Sandy was at the absolute peak of her fame, worshipped by audiences, those closest to her noted she carried a profound, unshakeable internal loneliness. She was constantly looking out of her own castle windows feeling entirely misunderstood.
‘The song captures that specific feminine isolation, the feeling of a room full of people listening but with no one to heed her call. When you have a voice like Sandy's the world immediately feels a sense of ownership over you. The industry, the audience, and those nearest you, build a figurative castle around your talent. They want to keep you in a specific room, singing a specific way, serving a specific purpose.
‘That guarded door Sandy sings about is the claustrophobia of being deeply perceived but never truly seen. It is the exhausting realisation that your unique gift has become the very thing that isolates you from a normal, free life.’
How often she has gazed from castle windows o'er And watched the daylight passing within her captive wall
With no one to heed her call
Her days of precious freedom, forfeited long before
To live such fruitless years behind a guarded door
But those days will last no more
Denny’s timeless 1968 composition, which appeared on Fairport’s What We Did On Our Holidays album the following year, is delivered with a delicacy and poignancy that is deeply moving. The Sussex-born Clarke does not attempt to imitate; she has a touching tone of her own, an almost classical precision, as an introduction to her self-penned treasures on Far From Nowhere, Parenthesis, I and Onliness will reveal.
As she prepared for a tour honouring Denny’s memory last year, Across The Evening Sky, Clarke told Songlines: ‘Her vocal range is note-for-note where mine sits, so I don’t have to change the key to any of her songs or any of the notes. And because the melody writing is so careful, the stresses are exactly where they need to be. There can never be wild variation because it’s written to wring the most emotional impact out of that melody, so I find the whole process incredibly intuitive.’
The instrumentation, as Elizabethan-resonant as the Fairport track led by the acoustic guitars of Denny and Richard Thompson, is impeccable: Mary Ann Kennedy on wonderful harp, Clarke on a chorus of recorders, Matt Robinson on keyboards and Dave Hamblett on drums.
‘I’m cautious not to push myself into this too much,’ Clarke added, ‘but there is a line to be drawn between her approach to songwriting and mine, how she uses tension and release, which comes from the balance between melancholy and hope. Her songs are not devoid of hope, but they are incredibly melancholy. I’ve always related to that. That push and pull creates great tension in the songs, and songs are only ever tension and release.’
Clarke’s husband Alec Bowman-Clarke, who directed the video, explains: ‘The song occupies a lineage of women whose voices persisted beyond the systems that sought to contain them. History reduces them to symbols. The song restores complexity. Performance restores breath.
‘Josienne appears not as Mary, nor as Sandy, but as the latest point in an echo. The film strips away spectacle and biography in search of a shared thread: resilience, defiance, dignity and the stubborn survival of a voice under pressure.
‘The film asks what survives when a story passes from one woman to another, then another, then another. Not history. Not memory. Just the latest voice to carry the message.’
Denny used the title of that song to name her new band when she left Fairport. Fotheringay had a one-album lifespan before she embarked on a solo career although a second unfinished album was released later as part of a multi-disc retrospective. That career was cruelly cut short at 31 with her death in 1978.
Tomorrow at this hour, she will be far away
Much farther than these islands
Or the lonely Fotheringay
Clarke will continue to sing her praises and keep Denny’s name alive for future generations. Those tour favourites such as Fotheringay, Like An Old Fashioned Waltz, Solo, Autopsy, The Sea, Late November and the incomparable Who Knows Where The Time Goes? deserve a covers album. Denny’s music could not have a more worthy champion, a self-proclaimed lover of beautifully sad songs. The parallels abound.
Lucky River: Kris Delmhorst (featuring Anaïs Mitchell)
We somehow managed to let a wonderful collection of songs from 2025 escape our appreciation. Belated acknowledgement has arrived for Boston-based Kris Delmhorst and the gorgeous Lucky River, our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, from her 10th album, Ghosts In The Garden.
Among a series of vocal collaborations, Lucky River flows even more beautifully in the harmonic company of Anaïs Mitchell. The latter must have loved joining in on those shared lines; the track’s dreamy vibe is reminiscent of one of her own wistful contributions to Bonny Light Horseman.
Delmhorst, originally from Brooklyn, New York, and now settled in Western Massachusetts and a regular on the Boston folk circuit, was inspired by a songwriting prompt. ‘It called to mind this image of someone fishing by the side of the road. I have family in Wisconsin and that’s a very common sight there. People will just hang out, feed their families, and sit by the river all day,’ she told Worcester Magazine. ‘It turned into a portrait of somebody who has gotten left behind by their own life, kicked into the margins.’
Heron on the bank as thin as a door
He don’t even notice me anymore
I been moving along, I been sleeping rough
A little here and there but it’s never enough
A little here and there but it’s never enough
A little here and there
I had a little place by the package store
It’s not my place anymore
Wasn’t much but suited me fine
Every single day a little further behind
Every single day a little further behind
Every single day
Cars roll by on 53
Places to go, they don’t see me
Blew a little more cold rain today
I thought I wanted April but I guess I wanted May
Thought I wanted April but I guess I wanted May
Thought I wanted
Erik Koskinen’s consistently imaginative electric guitar, producer Sam Kassirer’s subtle Wurlitzer, Jeremy Moses Curtis’s warm bass and Ray Rizzo’s restrained percussion cradle Delmhorst’s strong yet vulnerable vocal as she duets with Mitchell, painting a picture of someone stranded in one place, unable to find a way out.
Lucky water, roll away
Lucky sun, call it a day
Lucky rainbow, let your colours show
Lucky river some place to go
Lucky river some place to go
Lucky river
The cast of guest vocalists – Mitchell, Rose Cousins, Anna Tivel, Ana Egge, Taylor Ashton, Rachel Baiman, Jabe Beyer and Delmhorst’s husband Jeffrey Foucault – began as a wish list. Delmhorst was driving home from a show and listening to rough recording cuts and imagined different voices accompanying her on most of the tracks. It was a mark of the esteem in which she is held that each of those singers answered the call.
Delmhorst described the album’s theme as ‘the X-ray that makes visible all the invisible presences we have in our lives’. A sense of loss pervades the record but the overarching impression is hopeful and uplifting.
The title track is an homage to her dear drummer friend and collaborator Billy Conway who died in 2021. Foucault honoured Conway on his 2024 album, The Universal Fire, which he called ‘a working wake’. Foucault accompanies his wife on another standout track, Detour, about a ghost mining town visited during a road trip through Montana, made more haunting, Wicked Game-style, by Rich Hinman’s pedal steel.
The impact of climate change, an indictment of our wanton ravaging of nature, is maintained in Age Of Innocence: ‘Paradise was so hard to believe in/ Once we were innocent and unashamed/ Now we’re the only ones to blame/ We didn’t even know we were living in the garden of Eden.’
There are ghosts aplenty, not just in the garden, on this album: lost souls, past mistakes and missed opportunities. It was recorded in Parsonsfield, Maine, at Great Northern Sound, inside an 1800s farmhouse said to be inhabited by its own spectres.
Delmhorst wrote Won’t Be Long during the 2020 global shutdown about ‘the weird, frustrated feeling of being stuck at home and watching so many things go off the rails on our little screens’. She asks: ‘Are you the match or the kerosene? Are you the head or the guillotine?’ She adds: ‘On further inspection maybe there’s no difference at all.’
In the hypnotic Wolves, the last track written before recording began, she stares down mortality as if faced by the eyes of her subject matter and asks: ‘Do you really love the story if you don’t love the end?’
After the release of Ghosts In The Garden, Delmhorst revealed she had recorded another album’s worth of songs that might be unveiled soon. We are still waiting. More bewitching tracks like Lucky River? Lucky us.
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