Luke Daniels – Old Friends & Exhausted Enemies
Wren Records – 4 October 2019
Historically, there is a fine line between poetry and music, and the written word’s relationship to its sung counterpart was often more complex than contemporary demarcations would suggest. The first word in Beowulf, widely regarded as the high point in Old English poetry and one of the country’s earliest known written texts, urges the reader to listen, or ‘hwaet’. The poem is meant for the ears first. What is written must first be spoken, or chanted, or sung.
In what we might call modern music – music since the advent of recording technology – the debt that song owes to poetry has often been downplayed. Direct settings of poetry to music are comparatively rare outside the realm of the avant-garde, and even the most well-known English-language poets are often confined to academia. There are exceptions, of course: a line can be drawn from Alfred Deller’s popularisations of Shakespeare’s songs to contemporary artists like Fred Thomas, whose 2016 album The Beguilers set the poems of Blake, Joyce, Emily Bronte and others to a haunting neo-classical/chamber-folk backdrop.
But these examples play it straight in the sense that they leave the bones of the source material intact. The poems are presented as concrete, unchangeable things. A rarer and perhaps more intriguing proposition is the artist who uses these well-known and highly regarded poems as a launchpad for something more lyrically experimental, something more personal. Luke Daniels is just such an artist, and his latest album, Old Friends & Exhausted Enemies, is a unique tribute to the poetic heritage of the British Isles. What makes it unique is the way each song uses a poem (or sometimes multiple poems) as a starting point to explore a different idea or theme. Daniels refers to it as a collaboration, and if the dead could willingly collaborate, that would be the perfect description.
So, for example, opening track Girl With The ‘Nut-Browne’ Hair chops up lines by Herrick, Tennyson, Campion, William Barnes, Joyce and Masefield and reimagines them as a single song. It’s an impressive technique, and one that Daniels makes seem simple, though it is anything but: the disparate lyrics are knitted together by Daniels’ own songwriting, which itself is poetic enough for you not to notice the seams, and the whole thing glides by on his impressive acoustic guitar. But the cleverness doesn’t end there. Not content with reclaiming several centuries of poetry to serve a single, new narrative, he also draws heavily from the history of folk music: the song’s title is seemingly a nod to the Irish folk song Star Of The County Down.
But for anyone who is aware of Daniels’ back catalogue this singular approach should not come as a surprise. One of his recent albums (2017’s Singing Ways To Feel More Junior) drew its inspiration from children’s folk rhymes and playground songs, while Revolve & Rotate (2016) was was written for the polyphon, a nineteenth-century disc-playing music box (it was the first new music to be written for the polyphon, by anyone, in over a hundred years).
The title track splices together words by Dryden, Jonson and Isaac Watts, and is a beautiful example of Daniels’ warm and soulful guitar playing, against which there is the thrill of the Chinese gu zheng, played by Zi Lan Lao. The gu zheng also appears in Officer Of My Career, which nimbly combines Elizabethan poetry with a look inside the tour van of a modern musician.
One of the most contemporary moments on the album is the soul-searching Who’s Going To Stop? While ostensibly one of the least ‘poetic’ songs on offer, its resigned wisdom packs an emotional punch. The shuffle of percussion (courtesy of Signy Jacobsdottir) is a perfect fit. By contrast, I See The Good In You is short, bluesy and full of unexpected humour and Where We All Must Go sets Daniels’ deep voice against an exultant combination of oud (Rihab Azar), cittern (Ale Carr) and cello (Abel Selacoe). Jim Beam And Brown Sugar, meanwhile, is raucous country in the style of Ryan Adams before the Selacoe’s cello breaks the song into something stranger and far more interesting.
A Father’s Cradle Song is, first and foremost, a searingly beautiful piano-led ballad. Marlow, Browning, Hardy and Wordsworth, amongst others, are quoted, but here at least the source material is secondary to the way in which it is delivered. Daniels’ voice has a way of controlling a song – even a wild, wide-ranging and complex one like this – in a way that recalls Van Morrison. Another piano-led song, Soldiers And Sailors evokes the emotionally charged ballads of Boatman’s Call era Nick Cave, or a more pastoral Tom Waits, and quotes the contemporary Belfast poet Ciaran Carson.
While most of these songs either quote numerous poems or are more obliquely inspired by poetry as a whole, The Weed The Wood And The Wagg sets a complete poem by Sir Walter Raleigh to music (with a few minor tweaks for prosody’s sake). The sonic landscape here is an alluring and deftly played mixture of folk-rock and country which is somehow the perfect fit for its seventeenth-century subject matter. Daniels’ gift for setting two vastly different worlds against each other and watching them dance together is never more evident than here.
The May Morning Dew is unique within this collection for being the only traditional song. Daniels’ voice and the Arco String Quartet lend it a sense of gravitas, while the voices of the Donegal Abbey Singers provide the drama and the melancholy. While it might be natural to assume that the song acts as a counterpoint to those with words by some of our most famous poets, the reality is that it holds its own in that exalted company – another example of how folk music and poetry may have co-existed in the past.
The final song, an adaptation of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, advances from almost courtly beginnings to something more free-flowing and elliptical, hushed by impressionistic percussion. It makes for a beautiful conclusion and shows that while the roles of poetry and music may have grown apart over the centuries, their essential purpose remains the same: to represent strong human emotion in a way that is recognisable and somehow mysteriously moving. Old Friends & Exhausted Enemies is full of that mystery and emotion. It is the work of a discerning reader, a remarkable songwriter, and a musician with the touch of an alchemist.
Old Friends & Exhausted Enemies is released 4th October 2019
Pre-Order via Luke Daniels’ Store | Amazon
Upcoming Dates
03 OCT – Cafe No9, Sheffield (Solo)
04 OCT – Artrix, Bromsgrove (Solo)
05 OCT – South Street Arts Centre, Reading (Duo show with Nancy Kerr)
06 OCT – Cork Folk Festival, Cork, IRE (Solo show with Polyphon machine)
17 OCT – The Cluny 2, Newcastle (Solo)
18 OCT – Hartlepool Folk Festival, Hartlepool (Solo)
19 OCT – The Carlile Institute, Meltham (Solo)
More details here https://www.lukedanielsmusic.com