Having released ‘I Can Breathe Underwater’ earlier this year, Portsmouth-born and Chiswick-based Tricia Duffy follows with River Stories, a collection of songs that touch more on folk than Americana influences (at times she suggest a female answer to Ronnie Lane in his early Slim Chance days) for six songs themed about water. First up is the, ahem, flowing ‘The River’, a fluid fingerpicked folksy number with violins and cello inspired by two storms that battered the UK in November 2023 causing massive damage and floods, the song, delivered in her pure voice, reflecting on how rivers can be both beautiful and destructive (“I’ve seen two sides of the river/The rapid and the calm/The power of the river/Can soothe and she can harm… What she takes she won’t give back”).
Given an airy and sprightly fingerpicked folk arrangement that conjures the 60s coffee shop scene, complemented by drums, ‘Johnson’s Island’ is a love letter about the people she met during a residency at the artists’ island community on the Grand Union Canal in West London (“a man who makes art from paper…a beauty queen inking, deer and rabbits…a spirit … telling fortunes to the weary…a hatter in the rooftop with a thousand pretty feathers…a great painter of portraits can capture any likeness”) who, she says “showed me how to find/My own fault lines”.
Living on canal boats and the mass destruction that can result from a water-logged log provide the inspiration for the jogging drum beat slightly jazz and blues rhythm of ‘Waterlog’, but written from the log’s perspective (“An ill wind sent me spinning/My shoots, roots and ties/Failed their mission, set me drifting with the tide”) but, dig deeper and it reveals itself a feminist menopausal metaphor laden anthem about mood swings (“I might support you/When you rest/Or cut your thighs to ribbons/I’ll turn a steel hull/Towards the valley/With the power I’ve been given”) and a plea for understanding in growing older (“There’s more to me that meets the eye/Treat me kindly, remember I/Held birds and children high/Once upon a time”).
Of a more jangly persuasion, the swayalong ‘Run With the Tide’ came from her meeting with Ryan, the operations manager at John’s Boatyard in Brentford, while working on Johnson’s Island who gave her a tour of the boatyard and spoke about buying boat changed his life, freeing him from the property market game, the song about the importance of the tide for those who live on the water (“Twice every day, I rise and fall/My rhythm set by sunshine or squall”), though the title line has resonance far beyond that.
Starting out with a hymnal a capella arrangement and building in power, it ends with ‘Haul Me In The River’, a song penned by multi-instrumentalist producer Oli Deakin, aka Lowpines, with its baptismal imagery about finding peace and calm from your troubles (“be still I pray, oh be still my hard and heavy heart/you’re stumbling so senseless to ends I cannot start/the ground be warm beside you wherever you be set/the hands that laid upon you forever laid to rest”).
She’s yet to release a full-length album (her EPs are usually six or seven tracks), but River Stories really deserves to be the one that, to borrow her water imagery, really opens the floodgates to a wider audience.
Mike Davies
Artists’ website: www.littlelore.uk
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