Devised as a chamber folk stage production telling the story of a 200-year-old Sabal palm brought from Bermuda to Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden in the early 1800s, and to the gardeners who tended it, Polwart joined forces with Murphy who created the sound design and Milligan who provided the piano. Windblown is now transformed into a studio recording of song and spoken passages accompanied by an illustrated book featuring Polwart’s script and artwork from the Royal Botanic Garden.
Told through the voice of the palm itself, it’s a reflection of love and grief, knowledge and identity, constraint and release that carries with it a subtext of the immigrant experience, opening with the seven minute ‘Hear The Rigging/Last In Line’, sea effects and tentative piano notes intro giving way to first wordless vocals then Polwart singing as the palm reflects on its voyage across the waters (“I can feel the whirring wind” to its new home (“You made me an island/where the hurricanes don’t blow… but I was made to bend and bow”) and prepares to face its end of days (“Let me go/Lay my body low and let me go/You are the last in line/my final palm house keepers, and kinder hands upon my stem, there never were”). It closes with tentative piano notes which also anchor ‘Bound Up Together’, a song about how palms have served humans across their lives (“I have been bonnets and buttons and baskets/fences and fishpots and bedmats and brooms/I have been thatch for to keep out the weather…You’ve slept in my shade in the heat of the summer/under my canopy, children have played/I have been woven to be the rope tether… we’re bound up together”).
Arranged with a traditional Scottish folk coloured circling melody of tinkling piano, plucked strings and earworm repeated phrases refrain, ‘Lay My Body Down’ returns to thoughts of mortality (“Lay my old body to the ground/For my time is nearly over”) but still with a strong, defiant spirit (“When they crank those gears, I will blunt the bloody chains”) and a parting request for future seedlings (“Mind me well to the ones who’re still to come”).
Echoing the earlier line, ‘Bend And Bow’ opens with a piano accompanied linking spoken passage veined with a poignant commentary on the human fascination for treating exotic curiosities as objects of spectacle (“In 1705 in Fishmarket Close, a Dutchman kept an elephant/in his first floor flat/Was your botanical endeavour ever just a bit like that?”) as the palm remembers “old Mr McNab/in his coal black, stove pipe hat and all those corseted New Town ladies in their rustling skirts and bustles” that came to ogle while it was unnaturally “trussed like a New Victorian” when, launching into song, it was “made to bend and bow, made to swing and sway …wrought by the ocean and the wind in my DNA”.
Ending with wave sounds, it’s followed by ‘After Hours’, a tranquil and ineffably sad piano ballad sketch of the Garden when all the visitors “and you with your names and your numbers and labels/your budget projections and your spreadsheet tables” have gone and it remains “pressed up against the windows/quiet in the shadows of the dome” with its fellow flora as she sings “Here I am with the fern, the bamboo, the begonia from India, Vietnam and New Caledonia/spirals and tendrils and rhizomes and roots/a wild inflorescence of strange, strange fruits”.
It should be clear by now that there’s subtext hints of themes about colonialism, slavery and migration (the telling line “perhaps we’re not so different, you and me”) but if you’ve not tapped into it yet then, preceded by a haunting piano reprise of the ‘Mind Me Well’ musical motif’, it is spelled out more directly on ‘I Am Windblown’ with the spoken introduction “I was an inflorescence once, then a black seed dropped by a spreading crown/Packed up and shipped off across the sea…. To the Port of Leith, via who knows where, from a crate to a cart to a house of glass” as she asks “did the townsfolk stare when they saw me pass over the cobbles of Canonmills?”. Punctuated by the sung refrain “I am windblown from faraway” it speaks of the care lavished in its new home (“You’ve tended and mended me hand upon hand, from keeper to keeper to keeper/You’ve watched me rise up to the heavens above and into the water you’ve poured your love”) but counterpoints it with a profound sense of loss in “I’ve never known the kinship of the Cedar or the circling of the Cahow on the Sargasso Sea/I’ve never known the scent of the Queen of the Night or the screaming of Longtails or the Green Heron’s flight/I am rigged like a ship that will never set sail with a collar and braces to keep me upright”, a reminder that a velvet cage is still a cage (“I have grown old and tall and wise, but I have not grown strong/And I long for the wind…for the salt breeze rustling through my leaves, for the shaking it up and the shaking it out”).
The only non-original on the album is Polwart’s piano slow waltzing arrangement of Robert Burns’ ‘Silver Tassie’ with a traditional Scottish air to the tune before waves wash in for the spoken and sung My Secret’s Out’, a reprise of lyric and musical phrases from earlier songs and, while somewhat at odds with the forced transplantation imagery earlier, a parting thank you for the care given over the years (“I’m like a hundred million others but you’ve loved me exactly as I am/You’ve tended me and mended me and you should feel no shame about this twist in a tiny seedling’s story and the truth of a new name”), finally closing with a five minute plus reprise of ‘Hear The Rigging’ and its gathering anthemic coda ‘Farewell To The Sabal’.
A sublime work both musically and emotionally, Windblown may well prove to be Polwart’s masterpiece.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.karinepolwart.bandcamp.com/album/windblown
‘A Sabal Song’ – live in Edinburgh:
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