Quirky is an easy way to label Exeter-based Hopwood’s third album, Gone To Flowers, (the title a nod to Pete Seeger perhaps), indeed the press release itself uses the term, but that would be to overlook that serious themes of mortality and endings that they embrace. Inspired by folklore, psychology, fairytale and nature, Hopwood, who is also an animation artist, enfolds traditional English folk, Americana and Eastern European music as well as field samples into her work.
It opens with the burping tuba of ‘A Nice Wooden Bench’ which, featuring Sherida Katerina on violin, is about how we want to be remembered after we’ve shuffled of this mortal coil, a traditional gravestone or crypt for some, for others their ashes sent rocketing into the sky in fireworks or being laid to rest in the ocean to feed the fish, For Hopwood, however, as per the chorus, she fancies “a bench/With a lovely old view of the sea/Where strangers can quietly sit/And ponder their mortality” with her ashes scattered under the trees to return to nature.
Field recordings are often an integral part of her process, case in point being ‘Breadcrumbs’, a song about the wisdom passed down through the generations, for which she invited people to send her the family sayings “of succeeding and of failing and of how to live life well” that are ghostly whispered throughout as, backed by shruti drone, she sings “our ancestors, our forebears, although they are here no more/They knew that things to come will cast their shadows well before” such as how “your great, great uncle twice removed had many things to say/On how to handle death and loss and how to find your way”.
Likewise, she asked people to write to her with their thoughts on getting older , these being turned into the oompah fairground swaying ‘I’d Rather Be Older (Than Dead)’, featuring Stuart Faulkner on accordion, such as lines like “An evil fairy visited me/The day that I turned forty-three/And every year since, she’s come round for tea/Bringing gifts that I don’t want/A lottery takes place every day/She gave me the tickets and now I must play/Which part of my body will bother me today… Into my joints some glue she poured/Kneeling is something I’ll be doing no more/It’s a complex manoeuvre just to get off the floor” with Janne, Clair, Terri and Darren adding their voices (and presumably handclaps), to the Sailor’s Return Wessex folk fest sessions swayalong chorus.
They say getting older is no joke, but Hopwood still manes to find humour as she sings “last year she gave me a fun new quest/In every town from east to west/To locate the toilets I am now obsessed/Well, it’s nice to have a hobby”.
Borrowing the melody from ‘Wild Side Of Life’ and with Katerina on fiddle, ‘It Doesn’t Matter Now’ is about love gone wrong as thoughts of growing old together come crashing down (“you told me you don’t love me, you told me you would leave/All I could do was open up the door”).
The longest track at just over six minutes, accompanied by chattering birdsong the plucked rhythm simply slow walking ‘She Became a Bird’ is an achingly poignant about song a woman whose health gradually declines until she finally dies, but taking comfort from watching the birds, seemingly responding to her condition (“as her health got steadily worse/More birds came to her windowsill …On days that were warm and bright/She’d sit on a bench and she’d watch them/She would learn from them how to take flight”), finally passing she finds relief in the freedom they embody (“Her last breath flew out as a bird…For so long she’d watched all those beautiful birds/And now she was one and the same/Floating, gliding, swooping and looping/Free and wild and bursting with joy”) as Hopwood muses “Sometimes I think she’s come to my garden/She watches head cocked on one side /I smile, I nod, I tell her that I still/Recognise her from the glint in her eye”, ending “One day I’ll fly up there and she’ll meet me/I’ll become a bird too when I die”.
Singing all 21 layered vocal parts accompanied by just muted drum in a monastic chant manner, written as reassurance for those suffering, grieving, in pain, or worried about the future, the hypnotic ‘All Shall Be Well’ comprises just the repeated stoical lines “All shall be well/All manner of things shall be well/This too shall pass” taken from Julian of Norwich and the Sufi Poets of Persia, in respectively the 12th and 14th Century.
Quirkiness returns with the marvellously titled ‘Igor Potemkin Meets Bayum The Cat’, purring contribution courtesy Maisie, a dark children’s fairytale wherein, in failing health, ignoring warnings from his friends in the pub, Igor heads into the mountains to find a magic cat to make him well, but, while cured, his rudeness and arrogance ends up with him being gobbled up because “Bayun the cat he prefers all his meat to be healthy and free range”.
Coralie Hopwood on guitarron and cuatro, the gently swaying “Like A Leaf” is, sung with a lovely vocal naivete, her wheezing setting on the traditional mortality-themed “The Life Of A Man’ (“Like a leaf we will wither and must fade away”).
Featuring field recordings of children playing, accompanied by piano, a single guitar note and recorder, ‘Never Said’ again has a simple childlike quality as it speaks of how “as children we heard what never was said… and so we invented the reason, the why”, again concerning how anxieties and insecurities are passed down across generations (“Your grandmother’s fear of being too loud/Is gifted to your generation/A silent poison hides in your mind/Shrinking your aspiration /Invisible bars locked around you for life/Of fear and self-limitation”) but advising “The older we get, the more we reach/A sobering realization/Whatever was said, or never was said/The future is our own creation”.
Another wholly a cappella number, all parts sung concurrently backdropped by sounds of a babbling brook and bird calls, ‘River And Fish’, sung in a piscatorial voice with a spoken intro, is another musing on the flow of life (“sometimes it rushes/Sometimes it slows…onward it goes”) and of being one with nature (“This home it flows, all around me/It contains all that I need/A flash of silver, darting and glinting/If I left here, I would die”).
Holding on to those who’ve passed by hoarding their belongings and artefacts will be a familiar notion to many and forms the heart of the almost folk rock ‘The Closest Thing To Holding Hands’, Katerina again on violin, as she sings of how kitchen utensils, pencils and “what others might call trash” keep memories alive and how “when I touch the things she touched/A magic starts to flow/My hands are moulded to the shape/That her hands used to know… It’s the closest thing to holding hands/Across the great divide”.
Starkly sung a cappella with layered vocals and accompanied by field recordings of wind, as if captured on some high peak ‘In The Whistling Of The Wind’ returns to the album’s core themes of connectivity over time and of transformation of forms and souls (“Every single atom in me/Was something else before/And I’ll go on in time to be/Something else once more/And I will dance and swirl around/Like dust in a beam of sun/And when that dust has settled down/My new life has begun”) and of how those distant voices are carried in the wind if we learn to listen.
It ends, opening with an owl hooting, with the echoingly fingerpicked, pipe organ, chimes and part spoken five-minute plus dark pastoral folk and ‘East Of The Sun And West Of The Moon’, as much an end of life blessing as a lullaby to send children to sleep (“Allow your tired eyes now to rest/For it’s east of the sun, and it’s west of the moon/Where the tired and the weary are blessed …For it’s east of the sun, and it’s west of the moon/Where you’ll find me love that’s where I’ll be”).
Sung with a gossamer enchantment, woven with poetic imagery and lyrics, musically inventive and complex, Gone To Flowers is a stunning career high that comes with an illustrated booklet and, for those who surf YouTube a series of stop motion animations, it’s a strong folk album of the year contender.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.amyhopwood.co.uk
‘Breadcrumbs’ – official video:
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