Sofie Livebrant – Weep The Time Away: Emily Brontë
Rootsy Music – 4 February 2022
Having previously put music to the poems of Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Charles Baudelaire, Stockholm-born Sofie Livebrant extends her settings with this collection of eight works celebrating the poetry of the celebrated English novelist, Emily Brontë, one of the three Brontë sisters, immortalised by her sole novel Wuthering Heights (The Unthanks also chose four of the poems featured here for their Lines trilogy).
Despite being revered by Emily Dickinson (who had No coward soul read at her funeral) and critically acclaimed, Emily Brontë was somewhat lesser popularly known during her lifetime as a published poet. Twenty-one of her poems (none of which feature here) were contained alongside those of sisters Anne and Charlotte, in Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, pseudonymously published and paid for by the sisters in 1846, the year before the publication of Wuthering Heights; it sold two copies. In 1850, Charlotte edited (and revised) her sister’s writings and included eighteen unpublished works for a new posthumous collection. However, her complete catalogue numbers almost two hundred, so this album only represents the tip of the iceberg.
Working with various guest musicians and produced by fellow Swede, Johann Lindstrom, it draws on both English folk, Laurel Canyon and contemporary Swedish musical influences for its interpretations, opening with the rippling rhythm of Mayflowers, a poem first published in 1908, on which she contrasts the coming of Spring with her feelings of desolation and desire of death.
Included in the 1850 edition, Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee again has a fingerpicked acoustic arrangement that flows like a stream, her voice reflecting a similar watery quality, capturing the melancholy of the poem, the subject of whom has lost connection with the earth and its beauty. Then, set to a crunchy marching percussive rhythm Deep Deep Down In The Silent Grave again turns to her preoccupation with death and the complexity of the feelings harboured by the living in the wake of the burial, while, airily sung with again a simple fingerpicked accompaniment and lengthy nervy piano and string midsection, a more uplifting tone (“And what a gush of song is given/To welcome in that light serene”) is struck with Awakening Morning Laughs.
Joni Mitchell provides the musical touchstone for There Was A Time, an urgent, driving train-time rhythm carrying it along as an ironic counterpoint to the mood of the era it evokes; the poem speaks of a loss of hope for the world and that whatever the poet may wish for things will not change. For She Dried Her Tears, a poem first published in 1908, things shift to a late-night jazzy upright bass anchored groove that echoes the buried emotions (“They could not guess at midnight lone/How she would weep the time away”). Meanwhile, from the posthumous collection, and a poem with obvious attraction for a musician, comes The Lady To Her Guitar, which, with its intricate Spanish guitar and piano runs and ascending vocal notes, muses on how music can tap into, express and uplift our emotions in times of sadness (“thy magic tone/Hath moved the tear and waked the sigh;/Hath bid the ancient torrent moan/Although its very source is dry”).
It ends with the otherworldly six-minute privately printed 1837 penned The Night is Darkening. A pulsing organ drone, lurching dazed march crunched percussion and backing choral harmonies capture the chill wintry imagery and the sense of frustration and desperation, of feeling trapped in a perilous situation and unable to leave, yet, in contrast, the number ending with a choral uplift like light piercing the clouds as the mood shifts from helplessness to defiance with “nothing dread can move me/I will not cannot go”. A wonderfully atmospheric album with Livebrandt’s nuanced interpretations perfectly attuned to the poetry and its reflections and sentiments, it honours and illuminates its source, adding further lustre to her catalogue and hopefully prompting more to discover Brontë’s original, often troubled, often dark but also sometimes hopeful poems.
Order the album via Bandcamp