Next month sees the release of The Lost Words: Spell Songs on the 12th July, which we recently reviewed here as a Featured Album of the Month. In the interview below David Weir catches up with Scottish singer and songwriter Karine Polwart to talk about the project.
David Weir: This project looked like such a joy to be a part of. Robert Macfarlane’s opening comment for a Guardian piece, “it felt like the folk music equivalent of Avengers Assemble” tickled me as I’d thought just the same. There’s such an undeniable mystery and magic surrounding the book, how did it differ for you in regards to your past collaborations and how was it working closely with Jackie & Robert?
Karine Polwart: Responding to a collaborative brief around a theme is something many of the musicians involved have become accustomed to. But responding to an existing work of art crafted by two writers you greatly admire is quite another. And all the more so when that piece of art is beloved by so many people and has come to represent something far bigger than itself, something deeply urgent about our culture and way of living.
Many of the musicians involved in Spell Songs had an affinity for The Lost Words before being invited to take part. Most of us already owned the book. Several of us were reading it to our kids. Kerry had already transformed two of the spells into musical pieces (indeed it’s her beautiful work which sparked the whole project).
I think we felt nervous. We wanted to capture the essence of Rob and Jackie’s work, its spirit and ethos, but in a way that brought our own craft to bear. And we really wanted them to like what we made! It’s such a relief that they’ve been moved by the transformation from page to music. So have we. Both Rob and Jackie have been so generous with their time and with their work. They placed no constraints upon us at all as musicians, songwriters and composers. And this freedom and confidence in us is key to what we’ve crafted.
The spells are so ripe for musical interpretation. I’m curious to hear more about your songwriting methods as a collective? How each spell was allocated, how the writing process came together from there and then also about the final transition to the studio?
There was nothing in the writing process so mechanistic as a formal allocation of spells, which is a kind of magic in itself. Instead, the spells found champions quite naturally. Rachel, for example, brought the fluttering shape of Acorn, a setting of Robert’s exact printed words that we fleshed out collaboratively as an arrangement. Little Astronaut was sparked by Kris and Jim mining Rob’s Lark spell for songlike refrains: “right now I need you” and “little astronaut sing” become fragile mantras. Julie and Kris alighted upon one of Rob’s verses for his new Selkie spell as a chorus, which Julie then improvised melodically over Kris’s chord sequence. Kerry’s deftness with vocal riffs and textures helped to define the cinematic noir of Ghost Owl. For Papa Keba, Seckou and Julie fished for idiomatic common ground in Mandinka and Gaelic. While Beth’s idiosyncratic rhythmic and harmonic shifts underpin the tender Goldfinch. And I conceived of the idea of a Blessing that incorporated lines and images from many of Rob’s spells. But we sculpted these together in the room over about an hour.
I’ve never before been involved in a writing process quite so effortlessly open and generous. Indeed, we’re sharing writing credits equally across the whole album in recognition of this spirit of making.
Andy Bell deserves great credit for managing the recording and production process in such a way that the character of each musician has literal voice. But we sound like a team too. There’s a quality of immediacy that comes with having very little time to capture performances. As musicians, we had to be prepared to prioritise energy and feel over perfection and to make time for every track to have its moment. Altogether, we had only three days in the studio, and one additional evening to bring the whole album of 14 tracks together. But what a studio! We recorded at Rockfield in Wales, which is a pretty legendary spot (Scaramouche! Scaramouche! Will you do the fandango?)
Regardless of the medium you work in, you are all collectors (of songs, words, portraits) and flag bearers. For musicians who undergo a project like this, you are also historians, ecologists, botanists etc. It seems an intimate understanding of culture and the environment is necessary to serve the material. Is this part of the thrill, delving deep into the subconscious and mood of your subject?
Folk musicians have a natural affinity for what’s historic and what’s rooted in the particularity of place. Often folk songs and stories reveal a great deal about how landscapes and cultures have shifted over time, and about the deep ecology of human coexistence with other forms of life. Rachel, for example, has a recent album inspired by her ancestral home in Wester Ross. Julie collects Gaelic songs from the Western Isles and is involved in local cultural mapping. And Kerry is fascinated by the symbolism of animals and birds in folklore. It’s a deep pool of connections.
Some of us have greater facility with shaping words than others. Others are deft makers of soundscapes, rhythmic wizards, or conjurors of melody. In music, there are so many different ways to embody meaning. And part of the joy of crafting collaboratively in the moment is a sort of dancing into spaces where you can offer something that someone else can’t. Equally, it can take a willingness to step aside when someone is already occupying that space. To offer less than you could is a kind of generosity and confidence. And it seems we’re all quite accomplished at that.
On Folk on Foot you described Wind Resistance as “a journey not into how a landscape looks but how it sounds” – your music is so rich with specific names of flora, fauna and places; it’s easy for listeners to lose themselves within an imagined landscape.
You treat Fala Moor reverentially but there is also the sense that “nature is not our salve. It is not our panacea. Sometimes it is its disinterest that is bracing to us” as Macfarlane claims in his talk Landscape and the Human Heart. It feels like this understanding certainly gives songs like I Burn But I Am Not Consumed part of their power and wisdom.
I was wondering if you could share a little more about your thoughts regarding the relationship between music, landscape and place?
I’m very deeply affected by landscape and place, and have, since childhood, wanted to understand where I am, and who and what has gone on before me. I’ve felt my own, our own, smallness. And I’ve noticed the layers of time. I grew up on a hill, amongst farms, overlooking the industrial Forth Valley. I know in my bones that I’m most at ease in certain kinds of landscape as a result. In a very direct and literal sense, I need spacious vistas, hills, bogs and fields. I’d struggle to live in a wood or on a flat plain. But I like also to see exactly what it is that humans are doing to the air and land around is. Growing up in sight of the smoking spires of the Grangemouth petrochemical complex, our human impact was in plain sight.
I make music rooted in these kinds of places, not only in terms of lyrical content but also in terms of sound and feel. Listen to Seckou or Julie, for example, and hear different landscapes in their playing and singing. We are all influenced by the landscapes we pass through and inhabit.
I find an unlikely hopefulness in knowing that the land and life around us dwarfs us in the arc of time. It’s easy to get caught in the despair of four or five-year cycles of political activity. I’m afraid, and I do. But whilst it matters that we have agency, responsibility and the desire to influence change, especially around climate collapse, I take heart in recognising environmental forces that go way beyond us. Perhaps, the most privileged amongst us in the world need to be viscerally reminded of this in a way that billions elsewhere don’t, because others are already paying a heavy price for the privilege and disconnection of the lives many of us lead in these isles.
How did your stay in Herefordshire countryside and the time spent rambling with the team feed into the music?
Walking with people and sharing food creates a kind of intimacy and ease that’s priceless. The sense of quiet, and the luxurious lack of distraction cultivated by the whole Spell Songs backroom team enabled us to collaborate easefully. But, of course, the question of connection with land, and with the non-human life that’s all around us isn’t the exclusive domain of rural areas. London, for example, is proclaiming its identity as a National Park city this spring. Our towns and cities are where most of us live, and they’re alive too in their own fashion. So we need to find ways to engage with these issues of land and ecology and non-human life wherever we are.
“People are using the book, every day, and every day teaching us more about it.”
Morris’ ‘beautiful protest’ certainly doesn’t seem to be losing any traction either. Often when musicians discuss the release of a new album, they talk about the music becoming public domain and ultimately an unpredictable force that then moves beyond them.
I was wondering what you thought about the cultural phenomenon of TLW? It has a wildness of its own, there’s a genuine sense these spells cast might will more creatures into existence – one fan shared “My awareness was heightened. I know people call this ‘frequency illusion’. I call it natural magic!”
The Lost Words has indeed caught alight in a rare way. From the UK-wide crowdfunding for school libraries to the excellent supporting materials compiled and devised by the John Muir Trust. It’s a thing of openness and depth that’s found its way into palliative care and Alzheimer’s support, and so many other areas of care and connection.
As a writer or maker, relinquishing control over how your work lands and what it means to others, is one of the most liberating and inspiring aspects of creating. It’s a true collaboration between giver and receiver. The connections and stories and energies that it unleashes are unknowable in advance, and all the more beautiful for that.
But you have to leave space for that.
One of the defining characteristics of The Lost Words is its physical and emotional spaciousness. The book is quite literally uncluttered in its design. It represents absence. And recollection. Jackie’s images are expansive. They breathe.
Wherever there’s space in a piece of art, others can insert themselves and their lives and loves, fears and values into it. I hope in Spell Songs we’ve opened up other kinds of space as musicians responding to this beautiful book and to the questions of loss and care and connection.
With it crossing disciplines and reaching diverse audiences how do you feel the record and live performances might take it further? Do you feel its reception also suggests a wider recognition in people that they do feel disconnected from the natural world? It seems more common in general, is it now more important than ever to remedy that?
I think this disconnect is everywhere. We humans, at least humans in a twenty-first-century capitalist context, are not humble creatures. And even when we feel we’re connecting with “nature”, we’re often connecting in order to conquer or impress, extract or produce. That we talk about ourselves as separate from nature says it all really. It means also that we’re disconnected from one another. The two things go hand in hand, I think. Music and storytelling is key, because both are such elemental forms of human interconnection. And when we feel more connected to one another, feeling connected to everything else becomes possible.
Leading on from the same interview Macfarlane said:
“Perhaps we shouldn’t think of books as saving the world, but rather as catalyzing uncountable small unknown acts of good —to think about the ways in which small acts can together, cumulatively, grow into change. In this way we might think of writing as like the work of a coral reef, slowly building its structures through many small interventions, rather than like a single thunderclap or silver bullet. You always are threatened by quietism, but I think that to give up for the lack of a silver bullet is wasteful.”
I find it fascinating the ways in which folk music and environmental protest can intersect, as Macfarlane put it “Folk tradition’s long double allegiance to landscape and protest aligns precisely with the book’s own purposes”
Many contemporary musicians are harnessing the power of song as a form of ‘Abstract Activism’ as Sam Lee referred to it when promoting his Singing With Nightingales project: “The intention of the project is nature connection, and the nightingales and folk songs are devices and catalysts for the experience.”
We’ve seen Jim Aldridge & Sid Goldsmith up in arms, Rowan Piggott with his bee-lore & folksong: Songhive project and of course Wind Resistance (as just one example).
Do you feel folk music and more art, in general, might develop this stronger environmental conscience, or rather is it more where you look for it and how you read into the art that is already out there?
There’s a lot of rich work out there. I’d add to your list projects by my dear friend and bandmate, Inge Thomson. Da Fishing Hands was informed by the campaign for maritime protectorate status in her family home of Fair Isle. And Northern Flyway, her collaboration with Shetland-based singer and songwriter Jenny Sturgeon, has bird ecology at its heart. There’s a beautiful depth of engagement also in new writing by the likes of the Rheingans Sisters and Martin Simpson. And in Scotland, there’s a depth of traditional song and tunes, as well as new composition, that’s rooted in the particularities of place.
Developing greater environmental thinking, as a folk musician, is an ethically messy business mind you. Singing songs that touch on climate change or environmental degradation whilst traipsing up and down the M6 in a dirty great long wheelbase transit van isn’t consistent behaviour. Add to the mix the carbon footprint of the audience at any given venue or festival, and it can feel like a trade-off between intimacy and connection in a shared physical space (so vital in these times), and minimisation of ecological impact (what could be more pressing?) I’ll admit to huge and indefensible inconsistencies, not least in committing to fly across The Atlantic this spring to sing songs about Trump and climate change in New York City. There’s a straightforward vanity and denial in that decision which cuts against what’s ecologically justifiable. So, I’m as confused and conflicted as many others, and finding it difficult to make the radical changes I know are required.
“A pamphlet” as Joe Hill put it “no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over”
Sometimes it can seem difficult to stand your ground against the pressures of climate change and the cavalier actions of broken boys. You mention how music to you is a form of social function and much of your music deals with the ‘precariousness of life’, I was wondering how you felt about folk music as a form of protest in 2019?
I’m with Jackie on this one. Protest can be beautiful. It can also be angry, despairing, coruscating, yes. But I get weary of cyclical lamentation regarding the lack of political engagement in folk music, as if Sixties-style sloganeering and banner waving were the only way to engage deeply and meaningfully with the world. It’s important. Oh yes. But music that’s quiet, localised, reflective, nuanced, vulnerable, can get into different places in the heart and mind. And anyway, in a world such as ours, the very act of making music or art of any kind, and gathering in civic spaces to share it, is two fingers to all the atomising forces of modern life. Music matters.
Finally, it must be exciting to see Jackie’s personalised artwork coming together – it seems she’s portrayed you as a wren? Do you feel she’s captured your ‘spirit animal’ nicely?
I love Jackie’s notion that she’s not capturing each of our spirit animals so much as we, as musicians, embody the spirit artists of the creatures and birds. It’s a subtle shift in perspective, but important.
One of the devastating things about The Lost Words for me is that three of my most beloved creatures on the earth are represented in the book: the heron, the lark and the wren. I’ve written songs before in honour of each of these birds. And they’re birds I know and love in their physical being.
Wrens are very dear to me, literally and symbolically. They’re the most numerous of all birds in these isles. They’re small, and feisty, and surprisingly loud! In old folklore, from Ireland and across Europe, the wren uses his diminutive stature and wit to trump the mighty eagle and become The King of Birds. This is reflected in the wren’s name in several languages. To me, they represent the power and wisdom of what’s small, of what’s commonplace. And goodness knows, we need a bit more of that in the world, don’t we?
The Lost Words: Spell Songs is released on 12 July.
Pre-Order via Folk by the Oak (CD Book| Double LP). Tour posters and original artwork by Jackie Morris are also available.
You can also order your tickets for Folk by the Oak on Sunday 14th July at Hatfield House, Herts at which you can watch Spell Songs being performed live alongside many more great artists.
https://www.folkbytheoak.com/tickets-shop/