Back in November Katherine Priddy released a winter single with the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, “Close Season”, wrapping the spirit of winter and snowfall into the uncertainty and possession of attraction, possession, desire – warm things that glow in the seasonal dark.
It’s a good song, Priddy is in fine voice, the musical setting a little more emphatically ‘rock’, but the Poet Laureate’s lyrics, smart and succinct as they are in their character sketching and double-edged evocation of the ‘closed season’, do not quite reach Priddy’s lyrical depth and prowess on on her second album, The Pendulum Swing, a maturing of her songwriting as it expands into broader palettes of emotional colour, depth and exploration.
The Pendulum Swing is one of the great British folk-acoustic albums of the decade, one that stands besides Lucy Farrell’s brilliant solo set, We Are Only Sound from last year, or this year’s Circus of Desire from Olivia Chaney, a complex, rich and strange album of songs that sink like depth charges into one’s imagination. Add to that Josienne Clarke’s Parenthesis, I, and you have a quartet of distinct and distinctively brilliant female British songwriters.
If I was to imagine a musical highlight of 2025, it would be getting those four consummate singer-songwriters on stage together. As it is, I got to see Priddy twice – at the Union Chapel, where a surprise choir was sitting in the stalls to join her and George Boomsa on their stunning leave-taking song, “Ready to Go”, and later on the folk stage of Beautiful Days in Devon, where cross dressing-up for the weekend is de rigueur among the local Dumnonii, who filled out the tent for her solo set.
The Pendulum Swing came early in the year, as did Chaney’s Circus of Desire. Later in 2024, Richard and (separately) Linda Thompson released excellent new sets in Ship to Shore and Proxy Music respectively, while the Zeus of all singer-guitarists, Willie Nelson, managed to put out two superb late-period masterpieces in The Border and Last Leaf on the Tree, while the undersung US singer John Moreland’s album Visitor proved as haunting as anything by Edgar Allen Poe could conjure. In world music, a new set from Justin Adams and Mauro Durante cooked on a recipe of Italian Pizzica, rock, blues and Fairuz, found expression in Sweet Release, while Bellowheader Jon Boden celebrate and brought into life the lost world of 19th century Parlour Ballads.
Now it’s Boxing Day morning, it’s probably time to belt out a few of those.
Three More Essential Albums of 2024
Circus of Desire – Olivia Chaney
Last Leaf on the Tree – Willie Nelson
John Moreland – Visitor
Musical Experiences of the Year
Josienne Clarke at Cecil Sharp House, May 2024; No Noise at Purcell Room; Katherine Priddy at Union Chapel
Track of the Year
"My Time to Go" – Katherine Priddy with George Boomsa
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