Recorded at home over the course of three years on a four-track tape machine, following two EPs and a limited edition album, There’s No Song About A Stone is ostensibly the official debut by Thanet/London-based Italian-Australian singer-songwriter Corallina Beatrice Booker.
It has to be said that, with a kittenish little girl voice at times sounding at times like Kate Bush on helium, she can be an acquired taste, but, while quirky, it is endearingly captivating and perfectly in tune with her often off-kilter whimsical lyrics. Appropriate hooting included, it opens ‘The Owl Song’, described as “about closing your eyes and going for a walk in a blue forest at night, with tall dark cypress trees, the moon and big owls looking at you with yellow sparkling eyes” as, starting out fingerpicked with trilling vocals it gathers to playground jollity for the refrain.
Avian imagery continues with the ephemeral nature of love simile-shaded guitar dappled pastoral balladry of ‘Love Is Like A Swallow In The Spring’, another with a ‘Oh Oh Oh’ refrain, nature again informing with ‘In The Garden’, a baroque narrative fantasy (that may or may not be about grief) with accruing verses written after having a dream about being in a secret walled garden with beautiful roses, a girl and a blackbird.
Originally on the limited edition release, keeping the feathers spread, written after moving into her new home, the circular fingerpicked ‘Parrots In London’ is about the parakeets that live in the capital and her musing on where they come from (“Some say they came from Spain/Some say they came with the rain/Some say they escaped from Jimi Hendrix’s cage”) concluding that only the parrots really know where they’re from and where they belong. Allegorical interpretations about migrants at your leisure. The guitar notes echoing the title, the 94-second ‘Dewdrops’ comes from sensory memories of horse riding in a green valley with a small lake, rain and then the sun coming out and the dewdrops glistening, it pretty much speaks for itself.
The longest track, ‘The Ballad Of Lost Town’ was inspired by the story of Larrimah, a remote Northern Territory town in Australia, famous for its population of around 12 and from where, in December 2017, 70-year-old Paddy Moriarty and his dog disappeared never to be found. The song, with its Gothic narrative, imagines a wedding in a similar remote outback town where “where all dreams are buried in the ground” and , ominously, “The bride wears black, the groom wears brown/The vicar wears a funeral gown” and the wedding gifts are “stones, dead flowers and rubble”.
Another with lightly dappled folksy fingerpicking, ‘A Tear’ images a tear’s long journey from a moment of sadness or joy to the metaphorical ocean within the heart, while, history provides the impetus for the courtly troubadour-coloured balladry of ‘Love Can Pay The Price’, a song inspired by Sir Walter Raleigh and how, reportedly, when he was executed for treason, his wife Bess kept his head in a red velvet bag, allegedly found in a cupboard under the stairs at West Horsley Place and buried in the side chapel of neighbouring St Mary’s Church.
It ends as it began with a bird, here ‘The Crow’, a melodically circling and pulsing song set around Herne Hill and Brixton as it sings goodnight the people of the night as they pass the tree near the church. Whether it’s a reminder of the ever-present shadow of death is up to you.
Available as limited edition CD and blue marbled vinyl as well as Bandcamp download and beautifully illustrated by Booker’s hand-drawn sketches, there may not be a song about a stone, but it’s all rock solid lovely.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.bitybooker.bandcamp.com
‘The Owl Song’ – live:
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