Tag: Sid Goldsmith

Claire Vine will release her debut solo album We Carve Our Path on 13 March 2026 with Bristol-based DIY label Cuculi Records. A thread of unequivocal political urgency runs through this evocative collection, which features five original songs and five highly inventive interpretations of songs drawn from the traditional canon and the repertoire of folk legends Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl. Vine’s rich voice is the central pillar of the album, sometimes intimately alone and unaccompanied, or backed by a haunting choir composed of many layers of her voice and brooding electronic textures. The album was recorded at The Roost in Bristol, produced by BBC R2 Folk Award nominee Sid Goldsmith (Tarren, Wakefire), and features guest appearances from Goldsmith, Tamsin Elliott, Henry Edmonds and Luke Spurgeon, collaborations which were made possible by arts council DYCP funding.

Vine found her way into folk music in her mid-20s, having completed a music degree which she found “strict and precise and boring. That need for perfection sucks all the joy and meaning out of music so I stopped playing altogether for a while. I became quite politically active, going to Greece and Calais to work with people seeking refuge and asylum. And then someone took me to a Lankum gig, and I’d just never heard anything like it. I discovered Ye Vagabonds and various other Irish bands, but I didn’t understand folk music at all – I didn’t know that they were singing all these old songs. And then when I started writing songs, people told me that they sound like they’ve existed forever. I thought I was just writing in a style of music like those other bands, but then discovered they were often singing a lot of the same traditional songs in slightly different ways.”

We Carve Our Path is the follow-up to 2020’s Tunnel – a 6-track EP that intimately captures her early original songs. It was also the first collection ever released on Cuculi Records, a community label run by members of psychfolk band Hands of the Heron, of which Vine has been a contributing member since 2017.

We Carve Our Path marks a new chapter of artistic maturity for Vine as both songwriter and folk singer – a testament to her skill to sing the old songs in new ways, and to write new songs that sound like they’ve always been sung.

Claire Vine will be touring England, Wales and Ireland during spring 2026, and offering song-writing workshops alongside some of the gigs, inviting audiences and communities to engage with aspects of storytelling and emotional processing that she believes have a role to play in folk music today.

Of her own album, she shares that: “These are the songs that I need to hear right now. I actually get a lot of catharsis from singing the songs that I’ve written – it helps me process the state of the world and what’s going on, and I get a lot of connection from performing them live and seeing or hearing how the audiences respond. It creates a space where other people who care about these things can come along and say ‘I feel the same’, and that produces a feeling of connection for both artist and audience. That’s nice, isn’t it?”

Artist’s website: https://claire-vine.co.uk/

‘Let No Man Steal Your Thyme’ – official video: