folk music
Billy Bragg in support of The Leadmill, Facebook Live review - a fundraising success of a lounge act
Liz Thomson
On Saturday there was a stark choice: BBC TV’s not-the-Eurovision special or Billy Bragg live on Facebook in support of The Leadmill’s campaign to raise vital funds for both the iconic Sheffield venue, 40 years old this year, and the Music Venue Trust Crisis Fund. So no choice at all, the canning of Eurovision being one of the few plus-points of lockdown.As Bragg later observed, his job will be one of the last to come back “so now I’ve worked out how to do this perhaps I’ll do a few more down the line.” He reminded everyone to hang on to their tickets because he’d be back next year for sure. Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Like his friend the late John Prine, Jason Isbell is a master storyteller. His skill, like Prine’s, is to inhabit the characters he sings about so fully, and with such empathy, that it can be difficult to tell where the songwriter ends and the story begins.Take “Letting You Go”, the country ballad that closes seventh album Reunions. It’s a song packed with poignant detail that could be drawn from life: a father strapping his newborn baby daughter into a car seat, sleepless nights and first steps. But it ends with Isbell – father to a daughter, yes, but one who is four years old – giving his Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Back in April 2018, English fiddler player and member of BBC Radio 2 Folk Award-nominated folk band Pilgrim’s Way embarked on an 18-month busking tour of England. He walked out of his home in Manchester to explore the country, from Berwick to Braintree, from Deal to Darlington, playing and picking up tunes, and writing his Busking England blog (which is now coming out as a book from Scratching Shed). This set of tunes was recorded high up in the Staffordshire peaks at the 19th-century Danebridge Methodist Chapel, with guest players including Norway’s Marit Falt (from female trio Vamm) on Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As we unwillingly become used to lockdown, most of us are regularly looking for juicy tidbits to pass the time online, so here's another selection that should be well worth a look. Dive in.Sea Change Goes OnlineSea Change Festival, run from Totnes record shop Drift and usually based in Devon across a weekend in August, will be running a virtual edition this weekend. The five year old event, which has garnered a reputation for imaginative, independent curation, offers two days of live sets from Billy Bragg, Midlake, Metronomy, The Breeders, dame of folk, Shirley Collins, extraordinary Texan Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The latest Sadler’s Wells digital offering is 2019’s The Thread, a luminous collaboration between choreographer Russell Maliphant and Oscar-winning composer Vangelis (Chariots of Fire, Blade Runner) for the Athens-based production company Lavris. It’s a striking, contemporary take on Greek folk dance and classical mythology, with a series of abstract episodes forming the 75-minute work. Fragmented, and yet, as the title suggests, subtly woven together – like a collection of disparate beads strung onto one piece of string.Maliphant’s company of 18 young Greek dancers features six performers Read more ...
Liz Thomson
This is the perfect album for these dark and dislocating times, a delicious slice of folk-Americana, 10 beautifully crafted songs (plus a bonus online) that envelop you in the gentle winds and fogs of California’s Monterey peninsula, and the waves on its flotsam-dotted sands.It is in fact the fourth album by Nels Andrews, who now lives in Santa Cruz but who discovered his song-writing talent while in Taos, New Mexico, a landscape that has inspired many. Released in the US last fall, its UK and European appearance was originally timed to coincide with a tour. That must wait, leaving us to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“My favorite in the place was Karen Dalton. She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky and sultry. Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday’s and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it. I sang with her a couple of times.”Well Bob, that’s how you remember it. Dylan was writing in his 2004 memoir Chronicles Volume One about encountering Dalton at the Fred Neil-compered Cafe Wha? in the first half of 1961. Part of what he says seems fair. On 1969’s It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You, the first of her two albums, she melded Billie Holiday’s Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Waxahatchee’s fifth album wasn’t intended as an escapist fantasy. Written shortly after Katie Crutchfield decided to get sober, Saint Cloud documents a journey towards self-acceptance; one woman’s reckoning with her past and its impact on the people she loves. But it’s a journey that is as literal as it is metaphysical, Crutchfield’s vivid lyrics and wide-open arrangements painting pictures of the places she has seen along the way: Memphis glowing in the sunlight as if on fire; tomatoes sold by the bag on a roadside in Alabama; homesickness on the crowded streets of Tennessee.After evolving, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
When all around you is chaos and depression, an afternoon spent listening to acoustic music in a small club is as cleansing and restorative as a warm bath. At Camden’s Green Note on Saturday afternoon, two superlative folk music talents shared the small stage: Reg Meuross, a very English singer-songwriter who grew up in the south of the country, traded songs with David Massengill, who has made his home in New York’s Greenwich Village these past 40 years, arriving there from Bristol, Tennessee carrying the Edsel Martin Appalachian dulcimer his mother had bought him as a child.The two men met Read more ...
India Lewis
Big Thief’s show promised that particular brand of raw singing and perfect guitarmanship that only they can provide, something which they presented with a playful, earnest charm. Adrianne Lenker shared the stage with her three bandmates, two other guitar players and a drummer, all riffing off one another throughout the performance with an obvious love of the sound that they shared. This could sometimes seem perhaps a little indulgent, but the sound that they produced was so good that it was hard to dislike. There’s also something pretty satisfying about a woman performing an excellent solo, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“Fire and Rain”. Who doesn’t recall James Taylor’s first number one 50 years ago! Born in Carolina and a “graduate” of the 1960s Greenwich Village music scene, Sweet Baby James has given the world some enduring songs and been part of some of music’s greatest scenes. American Standard is his 19th album, his first in five years, and it’s a refreshing dip into the Great American Songbook – “songs I grew up with that I remember really well, that were part of the family record collection”. As indeed they were for many of us.This is classy comfort food which will appeal to those familiar with both Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Recent politics surround the EU and nationhood, fantasies of Irish Sea bridges and trading borders more porous than limestone have revived the granular rub between Eire and Britain, and the Celtic Tiger cool of the Nineties is a history module these days. Nevertheless the creative exchange between the two nations has a long and fruitful history – our folk traditions are conjoined twins, after all, and our contemporary musical cultures part of a continual flow back and forth.Imagining Ireland, first mounted to mark the centenary of the Easter Rising back in 2016, the year of the Brexit Read more ...