Grace Petrie – Connectivity
The Robot Needs Home Collective – 4 October 2021
It’s hard to believe that, with eight albums already to Grace Petrie‘s name, consistently sold-out tours and a mountain of glowing reviews, the Leicester-born activist singer-songwriter has yet to be rewarded with any chart success. If there is any justice, Connectivity, her ninth studio recording, should finally break the barrier with its wealth of crowd-friendly, hook-laden, anthemic singalong choruses of folk-rock and country-tinged songs about love and life.
Fuelled by the pandemic (“This demon came and got its claws in every little thing/Now there are miles and glass and distance that are keeping me apart/From the beating of your strong and steady heart”), it opens in glorious style with the upbeat fiddle-driven shanty-like Storm To Weather as she jubilantly sings “So best foot first, and hold on fast/Do your worst – this too will pass/And when it does, I’ll be there to fill your glass”. Merry Hell audiences should be beating down the doors to add this to their collection.
A couple of numbers address the experience of life as a working musician, the first, We’ve Got An Office In Hackney, being a wry poke at the music industry. Sung from the perspective of a rookie looking to catch a break and reach out to an audience but only being seen in marketing terms (“You got the makings there kid/Of a lucrative campaign/Cos we love this authentic/Lonely outsider type/Big up that aesthetic/On your socials for the hype/Whoever said revolution/Would not be televised/He didn’t have our contacts yeah/He didn’t have our PR guys”). It’s about the disillusionment and emptiness that can bring (“trying to work out why/If my name is up in lights/And it’s all going right/I’ve never been as lonely as tonight”) and how, at the end of the day, making music is about making a connection (“if there’s a single person out there/To whom this song something means/I’d take one lonely broken heart/Over a hundred millions streams”).
On a similar note, further down the running order comes the unaccompanied Galway, a memory of her first gig in the town and feeling things aren’t going to go well (“I’ve got no audience to speak of/But I take it on the chin/Cos I’m the worst thing on in town tonight/And it’s 10 euros in”) but being pleasantly surprised (“I’ve played rooms of hundreds/That have never felt so loud/Because it’s not the size of the crowd that’s in the gig/But the gig that’s in the crowd/And tonight’s, they are heroic”). Soaring on another rousing chorus (“And I’ll never be Ed Sheeran/God knows I’m no Steve Earle/Four hundred miles away tonight/From my Hertfordshire girl/And if temptation should befall me/To overstate my worth/At least there’s always Galways/To bring me down to earth”), it rounds off with a typical note of self-deprecating humour in the line “I said I’d never write a song here/Because this town’s suffered enough”.
There are further life-on-the-road images with the strummed rolling wheels Great Central Way that, while she’s “lived lives/Beyond my years/Seen open roads/With no end in sight”, sings to a love of and connection with her home city (“when the Foxes score/I hear the roar/From my front door/When the river Soar/Bears me back to shore/I will run no more”), but otherwise the remaining tracks mostly centre around relationships and introspection.
There have been thousands of songs written about how the singer’s lover or inspiration has left them bruised and hurt, but considerably fewer about how that person might feel about them airing that in public. Petrie puts that to rights with the bouncy No Woman Ever Wants To Be a Muse, starting with her own musical love letters (“To the girl I knew in Sixth Form long ago/It took me sixteen years or more to know/That she probably wouldn’t thank me for the songs that I wrote for her”) and moving on to observe “maybe Stevie Nicks really drove him out his mind but maybe Lindsay should have gone his own way too/And we’ll never know the girl who wasted Dylan’s precious time/Or if he left her tangled up in blue/I guess they both had versions/But we all know just the one”. Petrie owns up to being just as guilty, warning “Not to believe/The bleeding heart I wear upon my sleeve/For all the pain/It might imply/There’s another one out there somewhere with no right of reply”, adding “I dread the day I’ll have to answer/For the songs of break-ups past” because “no woman ever wants to stand accused/Of the crimes that you wrote for her/While professing to adore her/While disparaging her honour/With all you projected on her/While you revelled in the glory/Of telling one side of the story”.
If that’s laced with levity, there’s a deep poignancy to The Last Man On Earth, a country jogging, fiddle and banjo-led number about being a fallback friend when things go wrong (“Another Friday night when your plan A has fallen through/A Tinder date that sounded great was too good to be true/I guess besides love of adventure, sense of humour, zest for life/He just forgot to mention the new baby or the wife”) or, as she puts it, being a butch lesbian in a confusing friendship with a straight woman (“I will be the best I can/But you won’t choose me/Over the last man on Earth”).
Romantic Interest has a more upbeat outlook about the giddy feeling of finding new love, the line about holding back the tide suitably followed by the simply strummed, fiddle accompanied slow shanty Haul Away, using the imagery of “discarded shards of glass” shaped by the tides for a song about finding who you are (“I’m bound to follow oceans, I know no other way/Haul away, haul away/And make me who I am today”), that once again bears a piercing poignancy in “Now I find that that time and tides/Have worn my edges, smoothed my sides/For tourists who come wandering by/To mistake me for treasure”.
Keeping the musical mood uncluttered and restrained, Technicolour captures the awkward feelings of bumping into an ex (“I hesitate I smile and shrug/I’m not sure if we’re meant to hug”) and the sense they don’t want to prolong the encounter (“too soon it starts to slow/And you’re looking round for somewhere else to go/And I think how strange we could run out/Of having things to talk about”), the lyric involving both a car and an emotional breakdown on the way home (“For three years straight without a second thought/You were the one I turned to first/And just like that the riverbank has burst”).
The break-up aftermath theme continues with the acoustic fingerpicked extended metaphors of IKEA, about the bittersweet experience of visiting the store to furnish the next chapter in your life and seeing couples shopping for their first place together IKEA, “committing to each room design/Like it was a permanent oath” who “don’t notice all the ghosts like me/Back here alone, and starting from scratch/Hoping I’ve not lost any fundamental parts/And I’m sure I will remember/How it all fits back together/Because I know I’m not inadequately skilled/It’s just that some things/Take two people to build”.
There’s a final bout of self-examining and self-doubt with Some Days Are Worse Than Others (“I used to think I’d change the world if I could write a song/Good enough to make you see the truth/But everything I touch has turned to ruin and gone wrong”), another reflection on failed relationships (“I never dreamt how far I’d let you down/And I know I am remembered for the shattering of dreams/Never for the time I held the roof”) and identity (“Maybe I finally understand/That I might never know just who I am”).
It ends, however, with its only political note, another fiddle-driven shanty’ish number, The Losing Side, a passionate response to how the police handled the Sarah Everard vigil (“From common grief to Bristol up in flames/We came here begging justice, instead we got the blame/For peace disturbed, out on the streets tonight/And watching on the BBC you know something’s not right/When mourners come with candles and with flowers/Wrestled three on one, and pinned down by the state’s full powers”) but also the reaction to protest in general. A call to rise up in solidarity (“You tell us to light a candle, we have come to start a fire”) and raise “the mightiest cathedral” from the ashes, signing off with a final rousing refrain of “if I spend my life the losing side/You can lay me down knowing that I tried”. The album may be peppered with self-recrimination and questioning self-worth, but to paraphrase her, I’d rather have one fuck-up like Petrie than a hundred million prevaricating dreamers.
Connectivity is out now: https://gracepetrie.bandcamp.com/album/connectivity
Grace Petrie Tour Dates
October
Mon 4th BATH The Komedia
Wed 6th BRISTOL Trinity Centre
Thu 7th STROUD Sub Rooms
Fri 8th PORTSMOUTH Wedgewood Rooms
Sun 10th TORRINGTON The Plough
Mon 11th EXETER Phoenix
Tue 12th POOLE Lighthouse
Wed 13th GUILDFORD Boileroom
Fri 15th MILTON KEYNES The Stables
Sat 16th BURY ST. EDMUNDS The Hunter Club
Mon 18th CAMBRIDGE Junction
November
Fri 12th CROYDON Stanley Halls
Sat 13th NOTTINGHAM Rescue Rooms
Sun 14th EDINBURGH Summerhalls
Mon 15th GALASHIELS Mac Arts
Tue 16th GLASGOW Oran Mor
Wed 17th ABERDEEN The Tunnels
Thu 18th DUNDEE Beat Generator Live!
Sat 20th BLACKWOOD Miners Club
Sun 28th LEEDS Brudenell Social Club
Mon 29th NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE The Cluny
December
Tue 7th CARDIFF Glee Club
Thu 9th RUNCORN The Brindley
Fri 10th BARNSLEY Civic
Sun 12th MIDDLESBROUGH Town Hall
Wed 22nd SHEFFIELD The Leadmill
www.gracepetrie.com for tickets