Shirley Collins – Heart’s Ease
Domino Records – 24 July 2020
There can’t have been many career breaks as long as the one taken by Shirley Collins. In 1978, with her sister Dolly, she released For As Many As Will, which turned out to be the final instalment in a long line of distinctive albums that married traditional British and Irish song forms with Collins’ unmistakable, unaffected singing. But, afflicted by a severe and chronic form of dysphonia which rendered singing virtually impossible, she turned her back on music.
Thirty-eight years later, after being persuaded to perform again by Current 93’s David Tibet, she released Lodestar. If the break was long, the return was triumphant. Lodestar featured in the end-of-year lists of folk publications, but also wowed the experimentalists (The Quietus and The Wire both ranked it in their top five albums of 2016). Collins, already in her eighties, was back, and her work was more vital than ever.
Heart’s Ease is her second album for Domino, and it is every bit as good as Lodestar (reviewed here). She has spoken of regaining her confidence, and as a result, her voice sounds, if anything, even better than before. From the start, her singing is easy and conversational, the sort of voice that could capture the attention of a noisy pub or a hushed concert hall with equal ease. Opening track The Merry Golden Tree (part of the family of songs that includes The Sweet Trinity and The Golden Vanity) sees her recount a familiar tale of maritime injustice which goes back at least to 1635. But rarely in those centuries can it have been sung with such intimacy and grace as this.
Collins’ greatest skill is perhaps her ability to build worlds from nothing but her voice – as soon as she begins singing the listener has no choice but to inhabit the space she has created. The knowing cheekiness of Rolling In The Dew transports you instantly to a past that is affectionately portrayed without being sugar-coated. Collins first recorded a version of this song (entitled Dabbling In The Dew) sixty-five years ago, but this new recording somehow feels even more closely entwined with the spirited youthfulness of its lyrics.
The milkmaid protagonist of Rolling In The Dew makes a cameo in The Christmas Song, a brief sparkle of a song that manages to convey both the hardship and the beauty of a cold December morning in less than two minutes. Locked In Ice – written by Collins’ late nephew Buz – continues the chilly theme, telling the story of the SS Baychimo, a ghost ship abandoned off Alaska in 1931 and last sighted in 1969. The song is sung from the viewpoint of the ship, and Collins’ slow, measured delivery gives the haunting refrain (‘where the ice goes, I go’) further power. You can almost hear the creak of the ship’s hull and feel the shift of the pack ice in her voice.
Wondrous Love is another familiar folk song, but Collins renders it strange with the help of a slide guitar, perhaps a nod to the American roots of the song, which Collins and Alan Lomax collected in the southern United States in 1959. Barbara Allen pitches a hurdy-gurdy’s drone against a pretty guitar motif – a perfect musical representation of the tension between love and death in the well-known lyrics. Canadee-i-o is a match for the great Nic Jones version, while Sweet Greens And Blues (with lyrics by Collins’ first husband Austin John Marshall) is a slowly-unfolding highlight, beginning with an extended lacework of acoustic guitar before opening out into a tender exploration of the difficulties and practicalities of love and parenthood, the verses punctuated by a sweetly melodic fiddle. It could easily be mawkish or overly nostalgic, but thanks to that voice, frank and down-to-earth, sincerity trumps sentimentality. Tell Me True elicits a similar emotional response with a more minimal musical backdrop.
Shirley Collins has always had a playful side, a lightness of touch that balances out some of the more serious ground covered by her material, and this is still the case on Heart’s Ease. The final two songs are a brisk morris tune from the south of England (Orange In Bloom) and a thrilling experimental finale called Crowlink, which builds up an uncanny patchwork of field recordings and dark drones (courtesy of Ossian Brown’s hurdy-gurdy) before Collins’ voice filters back in, singing snatches of song from earlier in the album as gulls cry overhead and waves crash. It is an audacious piece, but somehow Collins’ presence makes it fit perfectly with what has gone before. It seems rooted in her home county of Sussex, the place that helped to form her distinctive voice, but it is also universal and provides a tantalising glimpse of what may still be to come in this long and outstanding musical career. But for now, we have Heart’s Ease, an album even better than its predecessor, an album as good as folk music gets.
Heart’s Ease is available to pre-order on limited edition Domino Mart exclusive coloured LP (with gold foil detail sleeve, 4 page booklet & 7″ featuring a recording of “Sweet Greens and Blues” from 1964 with Davy Graham, previously never released, and a corn dolly design by Cathy Ward on the B-side), deluxe LP (with gold foil detail sleeve), standard LP, CD and digitally. Pre-order: Dom Mart | Digital
Upcoming live dates
31st July 2021 – Charleston Trust, East Sussex Tickets
1st August 2021 – Charleston Trust, East Sussex Tickets
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Photo credit: Enda Bowe