Tag: Jenny Sturgeon

Though they’ve been pen pals since 2021, she in Shetland, he in Southend-On-Sea, and she sang backing on a track on his most recent solo album, other than a co-write single in 2002, they’ve never recorded as a collaborative project. Thus, reflecting topics that are during their conversations with the tracks pieced together from emailed voice memo melodies  and  fragments of lyrics, Wild Convenor is their duo debut, he on guitars, lap steel  and  percussion, she playing guitars, keys, Hammond organ and harmonium,  with a couple of guest appearances.

With rippling melodies, it’s a generally musically low key and understated affair, opening, he on lead, with the circling fingerpicked  ‘Jason’, a pulsing regrets-soaked song about a rift between erstwhile childhood friends  (“do you remember carving letters on the tree?/living movies bending with the breeze/me as the sidekick, you the hero”) and the gulfs that have  come between (“we don’t speak like we used to/too much river, too much distance/conversation not easy… stuck between stations on our old radio/you are medium wave”).

One of several drawing on nature imagery,  referencing the ‘Merry Wives Of Windsor’ and based around the Kentish ghost story of Herne the Hunter (the front cover is a woodcut of him), the title track with its spooked ethereal traditional  troubadour colours and pulsing wash of keys  puts Sturgeon upfront sketching  its spectral hunter stalking prey (“stealing glimpses at the lord’s horses/timid at the thought of it/pawing the ground in frustration”).

Their debut single, the rhythmically bustling ‘Flint Knapped’, is revisited here, Boulter on lead and lap steel, on a  gentle pastoral song about him collecting ‘dusty keepsakes’, rock fragments in particular,  while out  walking the Preseli Mountains in West Wales  and storing them on windowsills and bookshelves around the home,  the lyrics taking on wider perspective as he sings “infinite wavelengths are gathering in space/who knows sound they make/every word ever spoke they never die/whispered from lips/reverberating in time” as it closes on a cosmic wash.

Paul Ambrose  on electric bass, Sturgeon returns for the shimmeringly hazy autobiographical  ‘Time Between Days’ (“I’m always in the kitchen /it’s where I write my songs…I cook and swim in salt/it might be where I belong”) with its warm domestic relationship imagery (“he asked to play on Sunday/but  I stayed in at home/he asked if I would hang my head/but I would not kowtow…we argue sometimes but afterwards we dance”).

Lifted from ‘Days Of Shaking’, Harriet Bradshaw on  cello and set to a Canadian backdrop, ‘Talk to Me of Water’ recalls early Jackson Browne  with its theme of memories and loss (“the steam on the mirror/tracing outlines from your fingers/a heart from long ago/broken now, it comes and goes… Canada has gone/Bled now into other continents”). Sturgeon on lead, the circular fingerpicked notes of ‘Holding Patterns’ is a musing on life lived in anticipation (“our life in holding patterns/waiting to land”) and anxiety (“glimpse the horizon/is it the edge of the sea?/can I save myself from spilling over?/or do I have to wait to see”).

Relatively more urgent in its percussive guitar work, returning to that theme of distances between, ‘Scavengers’ addresses the way the busyness of life  keeps us from human contact (“plenty to say, but no time to talk on the telephone/rarely these days/pulled in direction/lost to the wind  we dance in circles”) just waiting to scavenge “scraps of conversation”, and again speaking of the songwriter’s craft  with “typeface on white paper/picking the idea clear”.

Returning to pastoral fields (“pink and orange are the autumn/gold and yellow are the spring”) and cosmic musical  ambience, Sturgeon sings lead on  ‘Introverts By Nature’ which, based around two people working in the Arctic but too shy to admit their mutual feelings, is another anchored in never being able to catch the moment (“time evades me most of the time”), distance  and the  fear of reaching out (“if only I  could hold on/as you slip through my fingers/a moment we both linger/hoping to be braver but we’re introverts by nature …maybe in another life/maybe next time I would stay/maybe we both need more than maybe”).

Boulter on falsetto vocals, it ends with the pulsing guitar notes and electric solo of  ‘All Of Us Together’  with its clear call to community effort in times of adversity (“hold on together/hold on through coursing weather/hold fast to the lines we sow/harvest one we come and go… we are pulling all the same/every hand together/we are filling all the days with sound/like seeds we stray and scatter/every corner eventually covered/to speak and be understood”). Reach out and embrace them.

Mike Davies

Artist’s website: www.mgboulter.bandcamp.com/album/wild-convenor-2

‘Introverts By Nature’: