Following their superb 2019 debut, Allison de Groot & Tatiana Hargreaves return on March 25th with Hurricane Clarice via Free Dirt Records. The album offers perspectives on the idea of family and community in a time of climate and culture crisis. The album’s producer Phil Cook talked about the “grandmother energy” they brought to the music, which touches on apocalyptic themes. Their playing is described as unhinged, bordering on ravenous, and the music they’ve plucked from the tradition comes from some pretty interesting sources.
Cook has an extensive range of influences and experience behind him, having worked with Alice Gerrard, Hiss Golden Messenger, William Tyler, Justin Vernon and more. As witnessed by his latest album, All These Years, which finds him delivering solo piano work, he’s not afraid of a challenge or to tread new ground. For this new album from Allison de Groot & Tatiana Hargreaves, Cook put that experience to good use and encouraged the duo to “be vulnerable both musically and personally with this project…” and to go in directions that they hadn’t really thought about, including their own family histories.
While their self-titled 2019 debut had buckets of energy, especially on tracks like the ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ and authenticity, as can be heard on ‘Willie Moore’, they have upped their game for Hurricane Clarice. Cook persuaded the duo to play sets in the studio in order to capture the energy of their live performances, and this is more than apparent on the album’s opener, The Banks of the Miramichi, released today.
The song was written by a New Brunswick lumberjack and fisherman Patrick Hurley and came from an obscure Smithsonian Folkways release. But the river in question, the Miramichi in New Brunswick, was at the heart of the classic book Silent Spring which partly sparked the environmentalist movement.
The song that Allison originally heard, sung unaccompanied by Marie Hare of Strathadam, New Brunswick, Canada, had a touch of the high lonesome to it and made me think of Irish sean-nós singing. They turn this on its head here and I love their interpretation as they transform it into a toe-tapping number, driven by banjo and fiddle. Their playing seems to mirror that rolling tide that flows along the river in all its glory. While the song paints a picture of an abundant and diverse habitat, the liner notes (see below) remind us of the fragility of such places and why we need to protect them.
Allison on The Banks of the Miramichi:
I was listening to the 1962 Smithsonian release Marie Hare of Strathadam, New Brunswick, Canada, and this song blew me away. It was written by Patrick Hurley (1842-1912) of Cassilis, NB, who was a lumber fisherman, and Marie Hare (b.1913-2007) sings it acapella with the most incredible timing and phrasing. In the 1950s, at the time that Hare would have been singing this song, the Canadian government sprayed massive amounts of DDT around the Miramichi to fight the spruce budworm that was affecting the forestry industry. In 1954, the entire salmon hatch died, and the ecosystem was completely altered. Rachel Carson wrote about the incident in the widely influential environmental text Silent Spring (1962).
Hurricane Alice is released on March 25 via Free Dirt Records.
According to the Free Dirt website, pre-orders for CDs ship mid-March, LPs likely late April.
Track Listing:
1. The Banks of the Miramichi (3:11)
2. Wellington (3:24)
3. Nancy Blevins (3:09)
4. Each Season Changes You (3:30)
5. Hurricane Clarice / Brushy Fork of John’s Creek (6:37)
6. I Would Not Live Always (4:23)
7. Dead and Gone (Hen Cackle) (2:18)
8. Ostrich with Pearls (5:09)
9. The Road That’s Walked by Fools (2:36)
Catalog Number: DIRT-CD-0104, DIRT-LP-0104
UPC: CD (877746010422), LP (877746010415)
Pre-Order/Pre-Save: https://lnk.to/hurricaneclarice
The single can also be heard in our Regular Folk playlist on Spotify here.