Today marks the release of the self-titled debut from Bristol-based folk music duo Fritillaries. Our readers and listeners may have already spotted that their latest single, Lost My Mind, features in our latest Folk Show here. We will be featuring more on the duo in August, but we didn’t want the release of their debut to pass with no fanfare, so we asked Gabriel Wynne, who, along with Hannah Pawson, make up the Fritillaries, to talk about how the album came together.
They have a number of tour dates and festival appearances coming up; full details can be found here on their website: https://fritillaries.uk/tour/
You can buy Fritillaries (Digital/CD/Vinyl) here: https://fritillaries.bandcamp.com/album/fritillaries.
Gabriel Wynne on Fritillaries
On a blustery spring evening in October 2019, Hannah and I were walking along a beach west of Melbourne. With the sun going down, we reflected and wandered. We chatted about where we were, six years since we started playing music together, and about how the Australian gigs had gone. We mused on the state of the folk scene back in the UK, what we felt about the songs we were writing, and what we might have to offer, eventually hatching out a tentative plan: on returning to the UK in December, we’d move in with Gabriel’s accommodating mum and spend the winter booking shows for spring/summer 2020.
Lockdown, then, saw us and our music at a pretty low ebb. New habits emerged, with music largely left in the corner of the room: a site of sadness and loss. We weren’t playing much, besides a few songs Hannah was writing, which were different from those we’d been playing out over the past few years – quieter, more personal.
I lost my mind.
The only pieces I could find
Were useless to me
They were coated in green,
And you held them out to me
In autumn 2020, we moved to Bristol looking for work, music largely in stasis. Hannah briefly reopened the question of whether her social work degree represented the career for her, starting a job she left after a month with that question decisively answered amid upset and pain.
In October, Pear O’Legs Records got in touch. We’d had a conversation which led to our 2021 single Little Bird and, eventually, to booking studio time for Fritillaries. The POLR team – with some affirmation, critique and belief – helped us to feel that our music was something that could grow, with the right care and attention.
The collection of songs that became the album were mostly quiet and introspective. For years, the noise of venues poorly suited for acoustic music had acted to increase our volume and decrease our subtlety, like the noise of a busy city to singing birds. These pressures gone, our music changed. We listened more to our instruments and voices and created arrangements which lent into the simplicity of the melodies and enjoyed the sparseness and space.
Lost My Mind was written as a response to the world-shrinking changes engendered by the first lockdown. Live music, around which we were trying to build a life, had disappeared over night, leaving us with very little mooring. Waking came from lying in bed listening to the pipes in the wall, a source of musicality and life in a quiet world. Suspending and Picture in the Frame, like much of Hannah’s songwriting, came from dreams, the former about being tossed around an underground train carriage full of mannequins, the latter about self-image and the sometimes frightening space between sleeping and waking.
I’m sinking through the tunnel, turbulence
Some kind of deep descent
I’ve found in your absence
Caught in my flesh, courting my death
One thing Pear O’Legs offered was the possibility of working with proper professional session musicians, which in turn afforded us the breadth of possibility to consider more expansive arrangements. With Andy Hamill on double bass and Kit Massey on violin, it felt like a change in sound system: we were stepping out of our car and heading into the cinema. You could walk into our songs and look up, down and all around. Still, we didn’t want to lose the organic musical chemistry we’ve developed over so many years and have taken care to ensure that the album expands without losing sight of the musical relationship at the centre of the project.
Last winter, Hannah’s mum sent over a poem she’d written. It was about digging through the dirt, sifting through the troubles of years, and planting flowers. We talk a lot about time, pace and the seasonal nature of creativity; things need time to lie fallow, take love, time and patience, and often grow when you’re not looking. From being signed to the label, and noticing the momentum we were getting in mid-2021 as the world opened up, it felt like Fritillaries had been born.
Hands searching in the dark and dirt
Unearthing something I cannot see
I imagine reaching to grasp the left hand
Of a king folded in the earth
But I found a coin instead
Its hard edges surprising
And the way it turned up on a Monday in the back garden
As I bent double in the flowerbed
Now I sow Fritillaries
Buy Fritillaries (Digital/CD/Vinyl) here: https://fritillaries.bandcamp.com/album/fritillaries
Website: https://fritillaries.uk/