East Sussex based artist & singer-songwriter India Blue has just released a new video for As a Flame from her debut studio album, The Circus Came and Left, from which I also featured a track on our Folk Show Episode 115.
She describes herself as a ‘contemporary faerie-folk musician’; it’s not a term that springs to mind when I hear her music which could happily sit in the psych-folk territory of the early 70s although comparisons to Joanna Newsom and Kate Bush are also inevitable and a bonus in my book. She draws lyrical inspiration from spirituality, history, folk tales, nature and the complexities of being ‘human’ and is mainly self-accompanied by her piano, Celtic harp and other string instruments.
She has also found a kindred spirit in Johanna Warren, having just released a Live Session on Warren’s own Spirit House label, which she set up as a ‘forward-thinking label for healers, mystics and free spirits.’
Watch her latest video for As a Flame, Filmed and Edited by Alessandra Piemontese, featuring Dancer Wings of Clover. It was filmed at Dungeness.
As mentioned above, India Blue also recently released Spirit House Sessions featuring lead single “Power” and a cover of SpiroGyra’s “Love Is A Funny Thing” as a b-side. It is available on all streaming platforms via Spirit House Records.
After rewatching the 1973 British Folk-Horror, ‘The Wicker Man’ India was inspired to write the single “Power”, calling upon the brooding, lilting soundtrack written by Paul Giovanni. Some of this musical influence can be heard in the atmospheric yet simple piano line that drones throughout the single. The influence from the cult classic can also be heard in the refrain “I have power” repeated throughout, almost as an incantation to reclaim a feeling of power which had been given away. The b-side to this single, a cover of SpiroGyra’s “Love Is A Funny Thing”, was chosen and recorded after a conversation with His Grace Kripamoya Prabhu at India’s local Hare Krishna sangha. Kripamoya Prabhu was telling India about a ‘faerie-folk’ band he was once friends with ‘SpiroGyra’, which led India to a night of blissful music discovery. “Love Is A Funny Thing” is a sweet and short song, but with an almost painful vulnerable honesty to the lyrics.