Accompanied by co-producer Adam Ellis on bass, electric guitar, percussion and ukulele bass, the Ashby De La Zouch-based singer-songwriter makes her debut with The Knight, an album that draws on historical and personal themes with highly articulate lyrics and emotionally engaging, high-pitched vocals but suffers from a tendency to be overly samey in the melodies and arrangements, meaning the songs often work better individually than as an album per se.
It opens, Wall on circling fingerpicked acoustic, with the vocally double-tracked, courtly-styled ‘Until You Ask Me Not To’ in which the story of a king knowing he may not survive his injuries in battle and worried about who will assume his responsibilities becomes a metaphor for not knowing what will happen when you are no longer able to help (“told you that I’d always be right by you/Until the day you asked me not to”).
One of two pushing past five minutes, again with a circling guitar melody, ‘Orphan Train’ draws from history for the story of a girl orphaned during migration from Ireland to America (“like some others your mother didn’t make it there”) and was later transported from her life and friends in New York to the Midwest as part of a welfare support programme that relocated around 200,000 children (not all of them orphans) during the late 1800s and early 1900s, many being exploited as farm labourers. Here, however, there’s a happy ending with her eventually marring the boy she met in New York and starting a family of her own.
A similar theme of starting a new life underpins ‘Sailing Out Of Vancouver’ in which, left homeless, a teenage girl reluctantly leaves her infant sibling in the custody of another family and sets off for Canada during the Gold Rush, finding a love only to be betrayed and abandoned albeit to a bittersweet end (“I spent the next nine months, hoping you’d come back/But you’d bought a one-way fare with no intention to come back/You didn’t know it then but you left your son behind/And what you’d given me was worth more than the gold I would find”).
In contrast, ‘Maybe One Day’ tells of a young woman prevented by responsibilities at home from joining the man she loved to emigrate to Australia, ensuring her children had the opportunities to follow their dreams (“you paved the way for your children, to do what you couldn’t do/If there were four corners, then scattered they would be/England, Canada and Australia and even one out at sea”).
The title track, originally ‘Noah The Knight’, has its roots in the bedtime stories of knights and dragons she would tell her children, this being about a little boy dreaming of one day becoming a knight (“he’s been to the training ground/And he knows not to put his sword down/With his sword in his hand and his shield by his side/He’ll take it all in his stride”). It is, of course, another song about facing down your fears.
‘A Heart Built To Roam’ is her reworking of the traditional folk story of a forever woman waiting for her lover to return from sea, here deciding to seek out instead “a love that I can touch and know it’s real/Maybe he won’t sweep me off my feet, the way that you once did
But it seems to me to be a perfectly good way to live”). Given a slightly more uptempo pace, ‘Ten Thousand Stings’ is about how it’s often the countless little things that cause a relationship to break down rather than one seismic eruption (“you didn’t hear my heart break/To you it was just another Tuesday…Did you never want to know/How I was feeling and how I spent my day/And wonder why I had so little to say/You asked me what it was/That put me a thousand miles away/I said it wasn’t one big thing/More like ten thousand little stings”).
Written for her daughter and the possibilities she sees in her boundless energy (“Slow down now your life is not a race/You are travelling a hundred miles an hour/Sit with me and tell me all about the flowers”), the pizzicato chiming, ‘Evelyn’ is a love letter saying she’ll always be there for her (“you can always take my hand/And with the depth we cannot know/You’ll always have a place to go”).
Returning to the theme of escape and new life, ‘Let Me In’ has a young girl escaping the workhouse only to find she’s only traded it for another world where she has no power over her choices (“as time moved forward, my voice was never heard/She said it suited all parties, and no one need ever know/And as long as I stayed quiet and covered, I’d always have a home”), eventually leaving her child behind while returning to England (“with money in my pocket, enough to make a fresh start”) buying a home in the Midlands so she can move on.
The sea often looms large in her songs, and, the second five-minute number, ‘Not What I Was Feeling’ tells of a man taking what he intends to be a final voyage out to sea, only for it to prove so in a more tragic manner, she, unlike the locals, knowing he’ll never come home.
Written after reading an interview with a mother from Ukraine and the feeling of powerlessness in her life (“I see the mothers, as their walks turn to a run/Trying to find a way to carry on/So they head to the border, where there is somewhere safe to stay/Tell the kids they’ll be back some day/And God only knows what is going through their heads/As they lie silently in their bed/Keeping them firmly in their arms”), the tremulously sung ‘The Same Set Of Stars’ asks “When you look up to the sky, do you see the same set of stars/Cause tonight it seems like we’re more than a world apart”.
Described as the album’s most personal (and most moving) song, ‘I Don’t Have The Words’ was begun at a time when her son’s health and life were under a dark cloud (“being told that you’d probably never talk one day”) and completed when, through his strength and the help of others, the future is more positive but still captures that parental despair of feeling helpless (“I don’t have the words, to make you hear me/And I don’t have the words, to make you smile/And I don’t have the words to keep you and stop you from falling/And I don’t have the words that’ll make you feel safe inside…I will tell you that I love you/If it’s all that I can do”).
The only track with a fuller sound and a drum beat, conjuring early Joni, it ends on a similarly upbeat note about overcoming obstacles to love, ‘Here We Go’ is about being able to wait and adapt in an ever-changing world, closing with the warm positivity of “We said we’d carry on until we fell/And if times got hard, then I could never tell/You were smiling, you were smiling, through the tears/And when time came calling we found ourselves a place/To raise our children and join the race/When they are all grown, when they are all grown, we’ll hit the road”.
Clearly a promising talent, if she can bring a little musical variation along the lines of that final track for her next album, then that potential can fully blossom.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: https://www.facebook.com/lizwallmusic/
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