Tag: Chris Pepper

I’m afraid that this is another album that slipped down the back of the metaphorical settee. Textile Lemonade was released at the end of last November, the title coming from the song ‘Like A Snail Trail’. Several of these songs appeared on Roberta’s 2025 EP, Airs On A Sixstring, which I rather liked. Born in Leeds, Roberta has enjoyed a long and varied career although not one that might be called conventional but it is fair to say that her music comes out of the 60s/70s singer/songwriter scene – she once opened for Ralph McTell – and Textile Lemonade is built on acoustic guitar with contributions from Chris Pepper and Aeron Z Jones, both of whom had a hand in the production.

It opens with ‘Howling At The Moon’, a title which could be from Black Sabbath but is, in fact, a co-write with Boo Hewerdine, a gentle song about global warming. As with all the songs here it repays study – Roberta isn’t an obvious writer. You can skim through the record as I did first time around and its significance can slip through your fingers. So go back to the beginning and start again.

A thread running through the album is that of separation, most obviously in ‘I Am Alone’ in which Roberta reflects with sadness on lost friends. ‘Let There Be Spaces’ takes the opposite viewpoint inspired by Kahlil Gibran’s ‘On Marriage’. It’s a philosophy that my wife and I adhere to. ‘Like A Snail Trail’ concerns more purposeful solitude – a songwriting exercise in the Derbyshire countryside.

There is a change in mood with the delightful ‘Old Clothes’ (another philosophy I adhere to) and the weirdly humorous love song, ‘Shade And Shelter’ – “I love you like a cactus spine that works into the skin” – and then comes one of the album’s best tracks, ‘The Lost Song’. This is the story of a notebook of songs that Roberta lost (and still hasn’t found) and the lengths she went through to find it again, It’s another song of separation, I suppose. ‘The Picture On The Wall’ looks forward to a possible separation with decoration from Jones’ electric guitar while ‘There Is No Light Like Your Light’ is a song of betrayal – a different look at separation.

‘Waiting’, says Roberta, is about how women’s lives involve so much waiting but this song is specifically about writer’s block. The closing ‘Wizard At The Window’ isn’t a Bolanesque fantasy but a song about earworms and about how they can get in the way.

I must apologise to Roberta for taking so long to review Textile Lemonade but I have to say that for me it was well worth the wait – I have been able to listen to it in a calm atmosphere which it has reinforced. Some records come along at just the right time.

Dai Jeffries

Artist’s website: https://www.robertasmithsongs.com/

‘The Lost Song’: