Hannah White & The Nordic Connections – S/T
Paper Blue Records – 5 June 2020
This self-titled release is a collaboration between the London-based Hannah White and four Bergen musicians, Lars Hammersland on keys, Ole Ludvig Krüger on drums, banjo and guitar, pedal steel, 12-string and slide player HP Gunderson and Oyvend Storli Hoel on bass and baritone guitar, along with her husband Keiron Marshall on guitars and harmonics. The album which was recorded live in a Berge bread factory plunges fully into the 70s country sounds she’s only previously flirted with.
Variously conjuring the ballad sound and style of Emmylou Harris (Like We’ve Always Done) and Dolly Parton (Start Again), her voice is well-suited to the keening Nashville colours, but she also balances these emotional slow burners with uptempo tracks like the driving City Beats (an observation of, well, bus life on the city streets, really) with its Bo Diddley on banjos rhythm and saloon piano runs or Gotta Work Harder (“Better pay attention when you go to school …These are the seeds that you sow, they’re the rest of your days”) that shares a musical sensibility with Al Wilson’s The Snake.
Forgiving, forgetting and moving on are the underpinning themes of the opening Never Get Along (“I ’m done blaming you for all that we’ve been through/And I don’t want to talk about it/I forgave myself and baby forgave you/We had our reasons”) and Start Again (“I don’t let the past into my tomorrow, I would sooner trust, love and lose again/ Than never take a chance”), while, a melodic cousin to Keep Me From Blowing Away, the pedal steel streaked, slow waltzing Pay Me A Compliment is a lament about growing older, getting worn out and losing your looks (“Pay me a compliment cos I ’m tired and I ’m worn/And the mirror’s unkind since my beauty has gone/ Look at me longingly like I ’m the belle of the ball”).
Then there’s the slow Patsy Cline country soul sway of the post-break-up When You’re Not Around (“I never thought that my heart would see me fall apart/ It’s useless I ’m lost and purposeless/ Now that you’re gone/All I can do is picture your face/ And wonder if you are missing me/ Just like I am missing you”), the narrator angry at herself for being emotionally dependent on a man (“Am I a person at all or just a string to your bow”).
An activist as well as a musician, White’s songs also frequently come with social inclusion commentary and a political edge, and that holds true here too, powerfully so in the slow, sad, softly sung, twang solo My Father, a song about a well-read man prone to falling foul of the law, which, whether personal or not, tells of the betrayal of a generation (“He was sold a dream of gold/ And he believed every word he’d read…He’d spend his days making plans/Sad that his family couldn’t see/They were too tired of poverty”) and how he “dreamed to own a home/The government gave him a loan/ But when my father couldn’t pay/ They came and took his home away”, ending on the heartbreaker line “When my father passed away/ He didn’t leave enough to pay/For his funeral and grave/It cost more than we could save”.
And yet, another slow-paced track, here with a Celtic air, she holds on to hope in the organ-accompanied Like We’ve Always Done and that “The sun will rise with every dawn to come” and, while “a blade will cut and a wound will form” we still “strive to take and overcome/Just like we’ve always done”.
A similar train of thought enfolds the six-minute Parton-esque ballad album closer, Man Without Men where she finds strength in love as, to a simple piano, steel and percussive backing, she asks “What is an I without them?”, her voice soaring to affirm that, “Like the note to the melody stave”, the will that keeps her going is “the love I feel for you… the cell in eternity”.
Prior to that she strikes a particularly intense note with Darkness, a Southern Gothic murder ballad in the Blackbirds manner, organ drone accentuating the spare, dry atmosphere before the rhythm picks up to a sultry sway as she sings “I’m guilty of a crime/ A wicked, wicked crime/ What have I done/They never found the gun” but, troubled by guilt (“The stars know my secret and every time they shine/It’s a piercing penetration”) aware that justice will out (“my time is coming yet/ I give in to fate like a foot to solid ground”).
In the album’s closing lines she declares that the spark of love, of love and of meaning, is “all in the ordinary”. Maybe so, but this album is anything but ordinary.
https://www.hannahwhitemusic.com/