Today marks the release of ‘In The Half-Light’, the debut duo EP from Joshua Burnside and Laura Quirke (Lemoncello). In his review of the EP, Mike Davies concludes:
In the Half-Light is a brief but assured, deeply enticing snapshot of how their two talents intermingle to form a single cohesive vision. Hopefully, this is a prelude to further collaboration, possibly exploring joint songwriting, and one to be eagerly anticipated.
As to how the duo came to collaborate, Burnside remembers passing a battered guitar around a Clonakilty pub and being blown away by Quirke’s vocals, while the latter cites Burnside’s performance of ‘Red and White Blues‘ at Other Voices. Burnside harkens back to several shows supporting each other in 2019 “We shared the stage a few times after that in the following years and ended up singing a few songs together here and there.”
But it wasn’t until a duet in The Duncairn, Belfast that the two decided to work together.
Listen to the EP below and read, in their own words, their track by track guide to the EP.
Track by Track: In The Half-Light
Far Away the Hills are Green (Joshua Burnside)
After hearing Laura’s Taking the Wheel I was inspired to tap into my own experiences of early relationships and teenage desires to escape the mundane. As it is in Laura’s song, there are two characters (although it is sung from the perspective of one of them) and my story also begins in an enclosed, comforting, yet somewhat oppressive environment, with the beating of the rain as a backdrop. Once the scene was set, the song sort of wrote itself from there.
As ever with my lyric writing, Paul Simon is an influence – the way he looks at something small and detailed, then widens the scope to reveal a larger theme. His song ‘Train in the Distance’ is an example of this and shares the grass-is-always-greener theme with Far Away, with the closing lines ‘The thought that life could be better, Is woven indelibly into our hearts and brains’.
Rana the Fortunate (Joshua Burnside)
I read somewhere about a Turkish soldier in the first world war, a woman sniper who had been terrorising the Allied forces at Gallipoli. She was eventually killed by all accounts, and was found with 50 ID tags of the soldiers she had killed, as well as 50 pounds. I thought there was something incredibly sad and powerful about this woman’s story, and wondered where she had come from. I decided to invent a little prequel to it – perhaps she was a court lady of the Imperial Harem, longing for adventure, bored of the trappings of high society and servitude to men. In the Sultan’s Harem, court ladies who were often slaves captured in wars, could rise the ranks and attain the status ikbal (‘the fortunate’) hence the name Rana the Fortunate.
The song was written as part of a larger concept album that was never completed. It wasn’t originally intended to be duet, but its structure lends itself well to it I think, with the alternate verses, and Laura’s harmonies in the latter part of the song, which really lift it far beyond what it would have been otherwise. In my version of the story, Rana relishes the war, dancing to the beat of the bombs and interpreting the event as a violent rebirth.
Taking the Wheel (Laura Quirke)
During the first lockdown, I went home to my parent’s house and was rummaging through old notebooks while cleaning my room. I found lines that I had written when I was younger: ’sits in the passenger seat and ponders the thought of taking the wheel’ and ‘condensation closing in, makes it hard to see the road’. It sparked the feeling of being caught inside something without feeling in control – a situation – a relationship – that’s not necessarily good or bad but just feeling the need to break free from it, feeling the desire for an escape from the mundane. I suppose I resonated with those lines again at that time and so started weaving them into a song. I had been listening to a lot of John Prine. I love how he names people in his songs. He probably inspired the way I wrote the song, the thoughts in the heads of these two people inside a rainy car journey, a conversation in the unsaid. I finished the song without much of an ending so that people could give it their own soap opera ending.. What did Sarah actually say to David? We’ll never know.
In The Half-Light (Laura Quirke)
One of the days while recording in Belfast we took a break to go for pints because the weather was too nice to be in the studio. We were sitting in a group of Joshua and Emily’s friends and they were talking about the loss of their friend Ash who had been a member of Vault Studios where we were recording and who died of cancer in January 2020. Before her death, Ash had a ‘living wake box’ made as an alternative to a coffin and asked other members of Vault to come and help her paint it. She wanted to start the conversation, to confront the idea that we’re all going to die. I really couldn’t describe how moving it was to hear them talk about what she did and the experience of dealing with their own grief while painting. The morning after that conversation, the words of In The Half-Light arrived – an attempt to remind myself that we won’t be here forever and neither will those we love most. On a break from recording that day, I went to visit the piano in the dancehall downstairs. I propped my phone with the words on top of the piano and pressed record on my voice recorder and the song came in one piece. I say it like this because this never happens to me. The recording on the EP is that recording. Joshua took the recording and brought the ending to a sort of transcendent place I wouldn’t have thought of. Though I didn’t know her, Ash’s story really affected me and I have her to thank for the song too.
Joshua also tells us: “Laura and I are gonna be singing a few tunes at De Barra’s in Clonakilty on the 25th July. It’ll be my first gig down that way in what feels like forever!” I’m envious of those that will catch this…not to be missed.
Order In The Half-Light via Bandcamp: https://joshuaburnside.bandcamp.com/album/in-the-half-light