Tag: The Winter Journey

ANNA is Anna Howells, a crooning smoky-voiced saxophonist and clarinettist who spent time in various Yorkshire orchestras and ensembles, the self-released Fall Of A Leaf being her debut EP, produced by and featuring Boo Hewerdine and Chris Pepper. Opener ‘Half Moon Café’ is a love song about an unconsummated meet cute encounter at a café near the train station in Saltaire while, a co-write with Hewerdine, the gentle, fingerpicked ‘Velleity’ (look it up) is about those little wishes about things we want but never get around to doing while, Pepper on pedal steel, the clarinet-warmed ‘Something And Nothing’ , about when it’s hard to know what is what has a lazy 40s feel. The remaining track featuring lap steel and marxophone, the strummed equally retro-flavoured ‘How Sad, How Lovely’, is a cover of a song by Connie Converse, an American singer-songwriter from the 50s who mysteriously disappeared without trace, her music not being commercially released in 2009.
www.anna-music.co.uk

We didn’t expect CHRIS CLEVERLEY to release a Christmas record but the five track EP, In The Shadow Of John The Divine, is just that. Of course, Chris puts his own spin on the season, so don’t expect familiar carols or happy Christmas songs. The opener, ‘The Ringing Of Bells’, begins with the seemingly optimistic but also portentous lines “In a year’s time this could all be fine/Over. Not something still on our minds” leaving us to contemplate which situation he has in mind. Yes, it mentions Christmas and benefits from a sumptuous arrangement but still…

‘For A Winter Angel’ is more personal but the optimism conceals a sadness, an unspoken event some time in the past. A choir drenches the otherwise simple arrangement. A different choral sound introduces ‘Vespers’, a song set in New York, specifically the Cathedral Of Saint John The Divine in Manhattan. Another rich arrangement and another song that mixes optimism and sadness. ‘Snowfall, My Evergreen’ was released as a single and it seems to be Chris’ take on The Snowman, the most upbeat song in the set. Finally, ‘Sister Winter’ is a little strange. Spiritual, regretful, Chris is apologetic but doesn’t specify why. It’s another rich arrangement and ends with the line “wish you a happy Christmas” but that is taken somewhat out of context.

Not your average Christmas record but you wouldn’t expect that, would you?
https://chriscleverley.com/

Featuring her distinctive finger-picked guitar alongside Emily Hope-Price’s romantic cello, clarinettist Alec Spiegelman and Andrew Sheron on violin, SADIE GUSTAFSON-ZOOK declares her new self-released What I Pushed Below as a post-breakup is about facing the inconvenient or uncomfortable truths we shove aside and try to ignore., It literally starts at ‘The End’, a lazing strings-wrapped number the opening lined of which are “ In the morning when I wake up/The first thought on my mind/Is how do I get out of here /How did I get this far in” and how “the warmth of our woodstove cannot overcome my doubt/And it makes me feel so mad that comfort keeps me here like this”. A tumbling guitar and cello pattern shapes ‘Autumn’s Fragrance’ (“is the fragrance of easy answers”) which embraces the season of mellow fruitfulness and its transitionary period from li ce)fe to death (“Learning from the past/As we try to figure out how to move forward/Nothing ever lasts”) things winding up noodling on piano with ‘Wallflowers’ and her realisation of how pushing herself down and being invisible has brought her to this point (“I think I know the problem now/You were holding me tight/And I let you be right/I didn’t speak my thoughts aloud” and that while they may be “beautiful on the windowsill…flowers need some room to grow”. She blooms.
www.sadiegustafsonzook.com

The first of three EPs being released digitally between now and next May, with a CD compilation at the end, KIRSTEN ADAMSON releases Paint With The Colours, the slow waltzing piano and twangy guitar lead track,   inspired by traditional folk poetry, the story of two star-crossed lovers, a singer and an artist (“living is messy, loving is art, paint with the colours of my heart”) while ‘Grandfather’s Accordion’ was written after inheriting it, its drone blending with the two guitars, in a reminder not to waste the time we have. Again the guitar twanging, ‘In Your Arms’ is a jogging country ballad about futilely dreaming of reuniting with an absent lover, ending with the piano and harmonica of the bittersweet melancholia of ‘Halfway To Buffalo’ (“Staying here is lonesome, leaving is a crime, but if I can’t have you my heart will do the time”), inspired by Buffalo Springfield and Barbara Keith’s ‘Detroit Or Buffalo’ and evocative of Dolly Parton at her most plaintive
www.kirstenadamson.com

Released via Bandcamp for Halloween, but with resonance beyond that, ‘St Martin’s Land’ is a seven-minute, percussion-accompanied vocal drone from LUNATRAKTORS, a traditional folk song from Hookland collected by folklorist and cult author David Southwell, the musical arrangement borrowing the tune used in playground chants from Burlstone Primary and the Bishop’s Academy in Ashcourt. St. Martin’s Land (“where naughty children are stolen away”) is supposed to be a secret world hidden inside a hollow hill, reachable only through tunnels, drains, cellars or ancient tombs and, according to folklore, during the 12^th century in Suffolk, the villagers of Woolpit found a green-skinned boy and girl in a field, disoriented and confused, and speaking an unknown language, the latter claiming to have come from a world of constant twilight.
www.lunatraktors.spa

‘Hawk & Crow’ boasts just the sort of arrangement that you’d expect from LISA KNAPP & GERRY DIVER with echoey natural percussion and sweeping ambient sound. It’s the first single to be taken from their upcoming album, Hinterland, due for a spring release and it bodes well for that project. The song, in this form, is Irish but is related to a number of Appalachian songs.
https://www.gerrydiver.com/  https://www.lisaknapp.co.uk/

More festive folk sees SETH LAKEMAN team up with Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson on flute and country duo Ward Thomas for a special Christmas lyric version of ‘One More Before You Go’ (Honour Oak Records) from his upcoming album Granite, a rousing chorus-friendly, fiddle and drums driven parting song of love, happiness, and sharing good times with friends and family, and, with a nod to refugees seeing refuge, finding a “sheltered port in a stormy sea”.
www.sethlakeman.co.uk

For those who’ll be alone at Christmas, you’re in the thoughts of THE MAGPIES and, more specifically, their self-released seasonal single, ‘Midnight Oil’, written by Bella Gaffney in the spirited tradition of The Pogues and Kate Rusby, she on banjo, Holly Brandon sending the fiddle soaring and Ellie Gowers strumming guitar as, taking a bluegrassy turn as they speak of looking at the sky over Montreal, they provide the spark and oil for lighting the lamp in the dark, a brief unaccompanied refrain leading to the gentle finale.
www.themagpiesmusic.com

DAVIE FUREY releases ‘Christmas Eve’, a single to support the Simon Communities of Ireland. Although self-penned, the arrangement has a suggestion of the tradition in its simple percussion and soft accompaniment. A gentle optimistic song.
https://www.daviefurey.com/

KATHERINE PRIDDY makes her seasonal contribution with the first of two collaborations with the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage. ‘Close Season’ (Cooking Vinyl). Slow and moody, whisperingly sung as it builds to a fiery climax, it personifies winter as a cold and insensitive lover, beautiful but hard, delicate but spiteful, irresistible but dangerous, who takes as he pleases, a reminder that frost may look beautiful but it can burn. The second song, ‘Daybreaker’, follows next year.
www.kathrynpriddy.co.uk

Sweden’s SOFIA TALVIK offers a typically different darker take on the usual Christmas fare with ‘AT Christmas’, a song inspired by a hiker who made a dramatic escape from the show while hiking on the Appalachian Trail. Her telling, however, with accordion, cello and classical guitar, hints at a less positive ending with her lone protagonist not making it to the shelter in the distance (“You could sit down for a while to catch your breath/The snow is soft as down /In the early morning light of Christmas Day/You found the place where you would stay”).
www.sofiatalvik.com

Not having officially released anything for four years (there’s some bedroom blues demos on her Bandcamp site), MINNIE BIRCH, now half of Awake Mother with Kathy Pilkington, returns with her solo single ‘All On The Black’, a dreamy acoustic picked number about dragging yourself out of rock bottom, presumably inspired her battle with a rare tissue cancer, and finding power in your pain and, as she says, using the lemons to make lemonade. A very welcome return.
www.minniebirch.co.uk

Paul Kearns and Steve Peckover, aka self-styled  progressive cinematic zen-rock instrumental duo ARMCHAIR GODS take a stylistic detour to join forces with Derbyshire Dales-based folksinger CAROL FIELDHOUSE for the acoustic guitar and pastoral fiddle midtempo swayer ‘Yule’, an uplifting folk song capturing the essence of midwinter (Yule running Dec 21-Jan 1) with her nature imagery lyrics (“An owlish moon peers through the leafless trees/Hoarfrost silvers the evergreens”) reflecting themes of togetherness and warmth, evoking the communal spirit of wonder at the dark nights at the turn of the year and hope with the promise of the return of the light. www.armchairgods.bandcamp.com/track/yule

Also released at the beginning of Yule, LIZ OVERS (formerly Liz Pearson of Chalk Horse Music) bring sparse banjo to bear on the moody, haunting  download only ‘Prayer To The Year’ which, taken from her upcoming solo debut Nightjar with Ben Nicholls on double bass and sparse hollow dark Appalachian bubbling banjo, Neill MacColl on marxophone and guitaret, acoustic guitarist David Tomlins, her breathy, witchy tones and chorale backing vocals dive into the imagery of nature and colour and mysticism of the season (“Black is the nightshade and the feast of the crow/Eight is the secret that we never will know/And all is a tangle of river and root…Blackthorn the winter, frost in the Spring/This year the rains came on a gatekeeper’s wing/Scarlet the garland, a prayer to the year/When summer is hiding in an old man’s beard”).
https://lizovers.bandcamp.com/track/prayer-to-the-year-2

A new album from ZOE WREN  is long overdue, but for now you can soak up the pastoral folk of ‘The Wheel’, a slow watery sway reverie of wanting a simple life (“I want to live in a house by the river/Where autumn meets summer/And grasshoppers whisper”) away from those “watching from towers as profits grow higher/Oil in the water/And fuel on the fire/Bleeding us dry in pursuit of more power/That will never be nearly enough”. And rather than being carried along with the wheel, a call for a quiet resistance in “You can’t fight a shadow from ships or from trenches/So we’ll run under stars/And jump over fences/And dig up potatoes to bring to the neighbours/And maybe that’s somehow enough”.
www.zoewren.com

Married duo Kelly Bayfield and David Edward Booth, aka KYSON POINT offer up a self-released seasonal double A side, marking the arrival of the year’s end bringing comparisons with  Megson on the punchily strummed ‘Winter’ capturing a snapshot of their Pennines home (“Down into the valley fell a waterfall of birds/Towards the chimneys breathing, gently, into the freezing air… Westerly is pouring, dam will overspill/Waterwheel spins urgently, working for the mill”). By contrast, ‘What Will Christmas Be?’ Kelly on lead, is a melancholic fingerpicked take on feeling decidedly not in the festive spirit (“Far too many cards to write and cannot make the time/Take a half-heart sentiment and post it up online/And the Robin sings a lonely song/From a broken branch of the Christmas family tree…Build a list of wishes for the cold economy/Blackened hearts and Fridays it’s a win for poverty”) , though it does find cheer and faith in the final verse of “Listen to the brass band warm a frozen market place/Coloured lights switch on the new belief in every face/Lying in a manger is the truth for all to see/Dolls and Innocence watch over this naivety/A song of hope and honesty and I ask again/What will Christmas be?”
www.kysonpoint.com

If you’re tired of all the festive hype already, ‘Boxing Day Sales’, the new single by RICHARD DAWSON may provide a suitable antidote. It’s a slightly off-kilter pop number with the strangest saxophone solo you’ve ever heard courtesy of Faye MacCalman. “You owe it to yourself” is the repeated hook.
https://richarddawson.net/

Impressively singing all twenty-one vocal parts, accompanied by a simple marching hollow drumbeat, AMY HOPWOOD releases ‘All Shall Be Well’, a song based on two mediæval words of wisdom, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well” from Julian of Norwich and “This too shall pass” ascribed to the Sufi Poets of Persia, from the 14th and 12th Century, respectively. Written during a flare up of her multiple auto-immune diseases, it’s for anyone struggling, grieving, in pain, or worried about their loved ones, the uplifting message being that, one way or another, it will pass. She’s donating 50% of all online sales to The Wren Project, a charity providing listening support to people with an auto-immune diagnosis.
www.amyhopwood.co.uk

If you want something that literally captures the sound of Christmas past, then, Manchester’s THE WINTER JOURNEY featuring Suzy Mangion and husband Anthony Braithwaite have the perfect answer. Their new single ‘Little Consolation’ not only has such spiritual sentiments as “There is a brighter garden where not a frost has been/The green there shines in sunlight hours and deepens in between…I could search a lifetime and find it not at all/But I shall not despair, my heart’s already there.. for finding is the heart’s desire” but was actually recorded on an old Edison wax cylinder. Complete with all the scratchy surface noise, the distant vocals sound like a field recording of carolers gathered in some village square.
thewinterjourney.bandcamp.com/track/little-consolation

CHRIS BRAIN has a new single, ‘Sun Did Glide’, to prove that love isn’t just for Christmas. It comes from his upcoming third album, New Light, due for release next spring. It’s built on Chris’ acoustic guitar with a nicely simple start which builds into a complex arrangement by the end.
https://chrisbrainmusic.com/

TRIP WOLFE blends folk and jazz and his new single, ‘1000 Days Of War’, is released to mark an anniversary of the war in Ukraine. There is a lot going on musically with percussion and saxophone dominating a complex arrangement underlying a lyric that packs a lot to unpick in its four minutes. Quite excellent.
https://www.tripwolfe.com/