Martha L. Healy – Keep The Flame Alight
Frogeye Records – 5 October 2018
Written during a three-month 2016 ‘life sabbatical’ in Nashville before returning home to Glasgow and recorded there the following year, Healy’s second album steps up a level from her 2014 debut as she explores both familiar themes of family and friendships, unfulfilled love and self-discovery. It also touches on her ambivalent feelings toward her homeland, of the need to escape its sometimes hostile greyness, but also the long for the warmth of the hearth and its people.
It’s succinctly addressed in the album’ opening track, No Place Like Home (the video for which premiered on Folk Radio UK), a number which, musically, reminds that Americana has its roots in Celtic and Irish traditions, a joint heritage Healy shares. Drawing on musical influences that include The Eagles, Traveling Wilburys and The Dubliners and with a twang to her voice that calls to mind Loretta Lynn, the album’s firmly of a country persuasion, backing musicians including such Nashville luminaries as David Spicher, Bill Cooley, Todd Lombardo and Grand Ole Opry house fiddle player Eamon McLoughlin while Wendy Newcomer provides harmonies.
Bruised hearts figure strongly, first up being Fall In Love Again, an early Eagles-flavoured take of a woman still hung up on a former lover and trying to move on. While conjuring a cocktail of Emmylou and Dolly and with Chas Williams on dobro, Woman With No Shame is an album highlight, sung in the voice of a woman looking for love but fated to a life of one night stands (“Aint got no ring upon my finger, and I guess that makes me fair game”). Finally, Unmade Bed brings a Celtic lilt to the story of a woman meeting up in a bar with an old childhood sweetheart and trying to recapture the past as “He poured the whisky; she missed the last train home.”
On an introspective note, the fiddle accompanied title track considers fears of time putting out her creative and personal fires, determining to kindle it every day, the central conceit spilling over into two songs of lives wasted; Mickey the slow waltz tale of someone who leaves at home at 15 never to return, the narrator asking why he never even called or wrote to the mother he left behind, and, rasped by harmonica, the bluesy country chug of Livin’ Someone Else’s Dream about a bored, unfulfilled housewife asking “How did I end up here?”
With Rory Hoffman on accordion, she waltzes into the final stretch with the lilting singalong chorus-friendly We’ll Be Okay refusing to give in to defeat. She switches the mood for the six-minute story-song Sisters To Strangers, Newcomer on harmonies and spare mandolin accompanying a moving account of a close childhood friendship falling apart as the years pass and lives move on.
It ends, though, on an upbeat note of resolution with Don’t Give Up, gently lapping percussion, fiddle, piano and accordion providing the foundation for a song about healing, overcoming difficulties and believing you have the strength to rise above the hard times.
One of the finest Americana albums out of the UK this year, Healy doesn’t just keep the flame alight, she ensures it blazes.
‘Keep The Flame Alight’ is released October 5th via FrogEye Records.
Find out more here https://marthalhealy.com/