Here’s a question: do singer-songwriters produce their strongest songs in times of upheaval, as they seek to express a feeling of “this stuff is hard”? Or do more powerful creations emerge once the anguish has been overcome?
Thursday night at Islington’s legendary Hope and Anchor: a challenging time and place to get an audience going, not least following the very assured edgy-yet-sweet singer-songwriter Daisy Veacock, another newish-kid-on-the-block on the edge of the recognition so many young artists yearn for.
Having carried herself to the front rank of young British singer-songwriters with her debut album, 2021’s The Eternal Rocks Beneath, Birmingham-born Katherine Priddy carries her muse from the eternal and mythological poetry of that album for a more centered, experiential sense of time as captured in the back and forth rhythms of The Pendulum Swing.
Declan McKenna is that rare thing, a popular contemporary male British singer-songwriter whose work tends to avoid solipsism, relentlessly projected vulnerability, and general whining. He writes interesting songs about an array of subjects, some even political in intent, and revels in expanding his musical palette.
Critically acclaimed in the US, singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz has won four Grammies during the course of her career. Born in Texas, spending most of her adult life in New York, her seventh album was created in her new hometown of Nashville, with an all-star cast of country-flavoured session musicians and producer Daniel Tashian.
Halfway through this album, “They Sold My Home to Build a Skyscraper” unlocks it. On first listen I’d been nodding along with the first few songs, enjoying how they find glimmers of more or less forlorn hope in amongst sadness and middle-aged domestic stress.
A flawless song list comprising Richard Rodney Bennett originals plus some of his favourite standards, stunning arrangements by conductor Scott Dunn, plus the mellifluous vocals of Claire Martin magically aligned in my Album of the Year, I Watch You Sleep, an extraordinarily beautiful tribute to Bennett marking the tenth anniversary of his death.
Some 28 years in gestation, Peter Gabriel’s eighth studio album of wholly original songs – his first since 2002’s Up – will delight his fans and top the charts. Gabriel’s best instrument remains his voice, that husky marvel, which is at its most resonantly tender, vulnerable, and intimate here.
Abigail Lapell is a singer feted and given awards in her homeland of Canada, but who has yet to reach far outside it. Folk is her metier but only insofar as it’s Joni Mitchell’s.
Five albums into her career, inspired by COVID lockdown-induced insomnia, she gives us a short set of lullabies from around the world, alongside a sole new song of her own. It is a hazily gentle and often lovely thing.
This UK premiere of the award-winning, Dublin-born vocalist and composer Christine Tobin’s latest project, Returning Weather, presented an otherworldly ode to finding home – casting multiple perspectives on our yearning for connection and human warmth.