While she’s featured on disc as part of Michell, Pfeiffer and Kulesh, it’s been five years since the Yorkshire-born, Cambridge-based singer-songwriter released her well-received debut album. Again playing guitar and bouzouki, she returns now with this highly anticipated follow-up, The Queen Of The Lowlands, ten self-penned songs in the folk tradition drawing on both personal and historical sources.
Produced by Stu Hanna who also contributes a variety of instruments and featuring fiddlers Chris Leslie and Phil Beer, double bassist Lukas Drinkwater, Vicki Swan on Scottish small pipes and Kulesh, Calum Gilligan and Ninebarrow on vocals, it opens with the latter interwovenly duetting on ‘The Woodlark & The Fieldfare’, a traditional styled pastoral number about the restorative power of nature in times of confusion (“On the brightest of mornings, in sight of the springtime/To the woods, to the woods, I did wander one day/But my mind was a quandary, and as the woods be my witness/There the birds in the canopy, they rung out my name….never doubt where you’re going, and only truth do declare/And you’ll fly, fly, over these woods, just like the Woodlark and Fieldfare”. For non-ornithologists, the perhaps lesser known bird is a migratory thrush most commonly seen in winter.
Trading verses with Gilligan, anchored around piano, ‘Hourglass’ has a similar mellow feel, the song, dedicated to her late father, a reminder to cherish life (the grains of sand metaphor embedded in the title) and to have courage and optimism in times of darkness (“this year has been a hurricane – a knocking on my window pane”) and that the light will come again (“Let the long nights of winter meet the new life of the spring/We can carry the warmth right through the night/For I know where I am going, where the blossom breeze is blowing/And we’ll watch them open slowly”).
The first of two historical numbers with a nautical theme, Leslie on fiddle and Michelle sounding like a female Seth Lakeman, carrying a swayalong shantyish tang, the title track is a tribute to the Dutch passenger steamship recommissioned during WWI to transport American Expeditionary Forces to France and later repatriate some 10,000 troops safely back to home. Again rooted in the past but drawing on her own ancestry, Drinkwater on double bass and bouzouki and fiddle imparting an Irish lilt, ‘St Helens’ concerns Mary Quinn, her great-great grandmother whose parents fled Ireland for Liverpool in the 1850s, and subsequently gave birth to Mary in the titular Merseyside slums, she working in a cotton mill and leading to a teenage love story wherein she became pregnant by some undocumented lover, Michell’s imaginary telling having her rescue a young lad from the ice (“She said I’ll give you my hand if you’ll stay safe and sound/For you’re no good to me if you’re lain in the ground”), the pair marrying to the bells of St Anne’s.
Featuring bouzouki, Beer and Swan, ‘Requiem’ takes its title from the Robert Louis Stevenson poem and epitaph and is sung in his voice, recounting his birth, lifelong sickness and marriage to and travels with Fanny (“across the seas we travelled wide/To America on the trains we’d ride”) and eventual failing health (“when our parting comes, when our words are done/When the ground beneath and I are one/When I’m laid down, when my days are done/That’s where the Southern Seas meet the setting sun”).
Co-written and duetted with Kulesh, ‘Flowers’ is their musical and lyrical contribution to the murder ballad tradition in which three sisters individually meet a hunted robber in the woods who declares he’ll make them his bride, the first two, Rose and Daisy, in turn persuading him their sister would be a better choice, the third, Lily, settling the matter by shooting him dead.
Returning to matters of history, the percussive, urgent and upbeat fiddle flowing ‘Lady Constance’ tells of Anglo-Irish revolutionary, nationalist, suffragist and socialist, countess Constance Markievicz from Sligo, who, clad in army greens, fought “for the weak and for the poor, for justice and fair stance” and died penniless having “given all her pennies to the poor and weak that she had saved”, noting how, when the locals wanted to raise a monument in her name “objections from the council came, and the cover-up was quietly made… For never will they let your name be spoken with integrity”.
Just over five minutes, the album’s longest track returns to maritime history for ‘Waterline’, the scandalous true story of how, in the 1990s, following the Cod Wars of the 70s, the Government cynically offered Fleetwood fisherman cash incentives to destroy their own boats to conserve fish stocks and allow quotas to be sold overseas, the industry and fishing community around it collapsing (“Now as labourers on land we’ll be/Far from the raging of the sea”) with the boats beached and burnt, their hulks still rotting away on the mudflats of the River Wyre on Lancashire’s Fylde Coast.
With a circling guitar pattern and a heady melody, ‘My Love Is Like The Rondelet’, the title referring to a French for of poetry characterised by a single seven line stanza, is another true story, one based on a love separated by distance and time (“My love is like the blush of spring, the fire to my coal/Oh but now my love he’s far from me, a lone fish from the shoal”), though despite our narrator declaring “My love will stand the trials of time, my love will never stray”, unlike your usual folk tale, she’s the one that proves inconstant the longer he’s absent, ending with “now I have a new love, oh, for to have a hand to hold”.
The Queen Of The Lowlands ends back at sea with the jogging rhythmical bounce, fiddle and accordion of ‘All The Bonny Ships’, her Yorkshire accent evident, a song based around her Polish paternal grandparents, Jadwiga and Stanislaw, being (like the other lovers in the song) reunited in England in 1946 after being separated for seven years during WWII (“it was on the fairest morning, soldiers freedom finally dawning/Twenty ships with precious cargo, they did sail/And when all the boats had landed, from the Spanish shores once stranded/Onto England where their freedom would prevail”). If this isn’t among the top folk albums of 2025, then there’s something seriously wrong with the genre’s collective ears.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.odettemuchell.com
‘The Woodlark & The Fieldfare’ – official video:
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