The watercolour cover of the debut duo album, Underwater Sky, by David and Kelly Booth (both having contributed to each other’s solo releases when she was Kelly Bayfield) solo shows the view from the banks of the River Deben in Woodbridge looking towards the Suffolk landmark from which they take their name. The album too, coloured by violin, pedal steel and cello, is rooted in our connection to nature and landscape, opening with ‘Dark River’, a jaunty mid-tempo love song to the all the rivers that run an “improvising dance” through the land as places of sanctuary, navigation, wisdom and, of course, their stories as “on your banks we build our home” and we become as one (“we choose you as our first friend, one foundation stone/no land can separate us we are water now, river now”).
Referring to informal paths created by erosion from people or animals taking the shortest or most convenient route, rather than following a designated path, ‘Desire Paths’ is, as you might expect, about charting your own course through life because “if you follow your desire you will never be wrong” and “following the crowd always comes with a cost” so “sometimes you just have to step outside and walk along the joy of your desire lines”, although I’m not quite sure that’s the same as Alastair Crowley’s maxim “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”.
Sophie Sirota on viola, though you wouldn’t guess it from the title, the Scottish-flavoured ‘Blink Bonny’ is rooted in the way our children seem to grow up in the wink of an eye, the song emerging from Kelly taking her son to university in Edinburgh in 2023, with the encouragement to “cast your net far and wide to catch the life you deserve”, and while the lines “I’ll see you in the blink of a bonny until we meet again my bonny lad” clearly relates to that, in fact Blink Bonny is also the name of a hamlet close to the university.
Their voices come together for the rhythmically steady ‘If We Are Houses’, navigating the metaphor of the title (“our walls, plaster cracked and falling/standing tall and proud, embracing when it’s needed… handles, like warm handshakes offered on a cold day/ windows, showing signs of their years looking out to offer shelter from the weather”) with the chorus speaking to the theme of community (“we would like to welcome you/hang up your coat, take off your boots/we’d like to welcome you in”).
Warmed by flugelhorn with David on lead, ‘Somewhere Else’ was written in the wake of his mother’s passing and speaks of the different ways we process grief (“we forget in our own ways”) and hold on to those we’ve lost (“we are not leaving, we’re just moving on/I will be here, though you’re moving on somewhere else”).
Returning to the land, sharing verses, the slow stepping sway of the strings-stroked, piano accompanied fingerpicked ‘Pyramids’ was inspired by the cairns they came across while walking the Southern Lakes district of Cumbria over New Year, a symbol of memories and memorials handed down across history, sometimes scattered but then rebuilt (“rock on rock, so many hands have moved these humble stones piled up to pyramids”) where “every hill-top congregation has its story/each one a monument to the size of love/for someone we have lost, left a memory or a prayer/places to recall that love”. Overlooked by those in a hurry to check the hill tops off their list, they hold “the feathers and the bones” of “countless sunsets” and “a thousand dawns”.
Introduced with a bird cawing and interwoven with spoken word passage about spirituality by their friend Drew Young, whose film From Dust We Came documented his coming to terms with his estranged father’s passing, Scott Neubert on pedal steel and Kelly singing lead, ‘Whistling Man’ is a revisiting from her Wave Machines album about their concept of the contradictory nature of God (“he’s got a dove and he’s carrying a gun/he’ll walk beside you and he’ll make you run/you’ll never see him but you’ll hear him everywhere…he builds the bridges and he builds the wall/he leads the lambs and he feeds the wolves/he plays the king and he plays the fool”).
Inspired by photograph of a man peering out through the curtains of a bar covered window, Kelly on lead the marching paced ‘Michael’ with its handclaps, flugelhorn, cornet and tenor horn, takes its contextually ambiguous nature to question our predisposition to misunderstand and jump to conclusions (“there’s a jury queueing for the bus, a judge serving up the news/Michael your face don’t fit around here and we don’t want to face the truth”), the song developing to talk of elective solitude away from the cold hearts of others (“it’s five steps to the apartment door, seven turns of the key/nine times out of ten he prays I hope that no-one notices me …lock me in my sanctuary/this lonesome world is the prison that you kindly built for me”).
Another song written in the Lake District when they should have been in Sweden, Kelly on vocals accompanied by just guitar and Jonathan Evans’s cello, ‘Home Is The Love’ is a simple and straightforward mutual rescue love song (“you found me, mapless, broken compass in hand/I watched you crumbling, in your house built on sand/we stepped out together barefoot on a white winter lake/trusting in the choices that our feet would make”) with the lines “without walls or borrowed bricks of our own we’ll build our lives together stone upon stone” echoing the sentiments of both ‘If We Are Houses’ and ‘Pyramids’.
It ends, matrimonially, with David singing lead and Kelly providing the soaring impetus and piano on the jazz-tinged rhythmically choppy ‘The Wedding’, brass joining family and friends and absent voices for a celebration of “one perfect day for imperfect times” as “we lift our voices loud in love”. You’ll want to be part of the album’s congregation.
Mike Davies
Artists’ website: www.kysonpoint.com
‘Dark River’ – live:
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