Tag: A Hundred Years Ago

After a gap of four years since their Hunter debut, accompanied by John Parker on double bass, the couple return with an album that, per the title, takes a three year journey through their lives since its release, embracing themes of new parenthood, home and family. Informed by their own lives as touring musicians, it’s the lilting ‘Safe Travels’ with its tenor guitar and picked banjo that launches the voyage, a song wishing safe passage for loved ones as they make their way on their own journeys (“Be steady/As you move along/Go slowly, go slowly/With these tired eyes/Make sure that these wheels/Stay safe in the lines”), those left behind waiting until they “roll back to my arms/Like the softest of tides”.

A previous single, the swayalong ‘Our House’ has Christina celebrating growing up in a musical household as mum and her friends who hold song sessions in the kitchen in turn giving way to the fingerpicked double-tracked vocals of ‘Winter Song’, a gently melancholic love letter to the changing seasons and the memories that accompany them, imagined as roaming travellers who roll away home each year.

Striking another personal note, featuring plucked banjo, fiddle, double bass and a Suffolk field recording of birdsong, ‘Etta’s Song’ is a homage to their daughter, inspired by cold winter nights and early hours cradling her in the quiet of the house and immersing her in music just as her own mother had done (“I’ll sing you stories of old…Here I will love you as you grow and grow/Your roots they are buried, your branches grow tall/Here I will hold you and wait for the light”).

The album’s sole instrumental, ‘Raven Yard’ is a lightly dancing fiddle tune named after the medieval yard behind their 16th-century house in the centre of Norwich on one of the oldest streets, some of the yards named after birds. The tempo picks up for the tumbling scurrying guitar notes of ‘The Starless Sea’ inspired by the novel of the same name by Erin Morgenstern that Christina read during late pregnancy, the song exploring love and companionship, speaking again to safe passage and capturing thoughts of impending motherhood (“I could row you home/I could keep you warm/I could hold you close/I could keep you safe/On the starless sea/Oh moon look down with open eyes/And cover us now in ocean tides”).

Pregnancy eventually comes to fruition, and, again with maritime imagery, the album duly gives way to the kittenish, scampering guitar notes and fiddle of ‘A Hundred Years Ago’, a song about birth trauma, the parts of you left behind and the power of the human body under duress, anchored in the five days she spent in hospital with severe pregnancy-induced hypertension (“Wrapped up in the needles and wires”) following the birth while storm Eunice physically and metaphorically raged outside.

There’s a return to the seasons with the five-minute plus ‘Shallow Water’, squeaky strings accompanying an urgent melody line. a song inspired by East Anglian fen skating when the ground freezes over turning flooded meadows into natural ice rinks on which, years ago, farmers used to make skates out of old animal bones. It’s an ode to the way traditions are passed down by the metaphorical many feet that have walked the same ground.

An environmental note also informs ‘The Old Weather Station’, a fiddle and strummed guitar numbers about an old polar weather station on the long abandoned Wrangellsland in the Arctic Ocean, now home to polar bears that’s informed by themes of home (“I know these hills like the back of my hand”), the ephemeral nature of material things in contrast to nature itself. Also rooted in fact and our relationship with nature, opening with distant fiddle drone and shruti, the Appalachian-tinted ‘Crow’ was inspired by Gabi Mann, a young girl from Seattle who fed the local crows with scraps from her lunchbox and. over time, they reciprocating by bringing her shiny trinkets, the wood cut artwork on the hand-designed card sleeve depicting some of those gifts. Opening with a field recording of the wind blowing through the hills, it ends with another of nature’s creatures, the dappled fingerpicked ‘The Mountain Hare’, which, found on the uplands of Scotland changes its coat to match the seasons, brown in summer, white in winter, to hide from predators, but now victim to the vagaries of climate change, the song’s message fairly clear to follow and a lovely closing grace note to an album that confirms them as among the brightest treasures on the contemporary folk scene. May they travel long as the road rises ahead.

Mike Davies

Artists’ website: www.christinaaldenandalexpatterson.com

‘A Hundred Years Ago’ – live:

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