Ahead of some solo festival gigs (including Warwick, Sidmouth and White Horse), and after a busy few years working on other projects, including making and touring a new Granny’s Attic album, working with Sophie Crawford on their Queer Folk project, and forming a new duo with Matt Quinn, George Sansome returns to his solo music a new single.
Building on the statement made with his well-received debut solo album in 2020, George collaborated with Leeds-based violinist Owen Spafford (Owen Spafford and Louis Campbell, Nidd) for his new single, Rosa. The track features the same stripped-back aesthetic which permeated much of his debut album – with just vocal, guitar, and violin, with no overdubs. It highlights the delicacy and skill of Sansome’s guitar playing and Spafford’s intuitive violin playing. The spaciousness of the arrangements and the reflective violin accentuate the drama and mournfulness of the song. The single and accompanying video were made in just one take – one performance, filmed and recorded simultaneously by Will Killen at Evoke Studios in Leeds.
Talking about the song and video, George tells us:
I came across this song in lockdown in a brilliant book of traditional songs that my good friend and Granny’s Attic bandmate Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne helped put together. It’s called Southern Songster: English Folk Songs from the Hammond and Gardiner Manuscripts, which Nick Dow and Steve Gardham worked on song selection and song notes for, along with Cohen on musical notation. The variant in the book was sung by Mrs Goodyear (age 74), of the hamlet of Gobley Hole in Hampshire, to George Gardiner in 1907 – along with an impressive total of 41 other songs. I fleshed out the song using a broadside from the Bodleian Library and made a few tweaks, but it’s essentially the same song as printed in Southern Songster.
A few months before recording ‘Rosa’, I’d met Owen Spafford for the first time when we were both playing a ceilidh in Leeds, where we both live, and we ended up playing in sessions together in the following weeks. It felt really natural making music together, and so made complete sense to bring Owen in to play violin on this song. He’s an exceptional musician and plays really sensitively and tastefully, and it didn’t take him long to understand what the song needed. We ended up with an arrangement that, at times, is really quite sparse but still has interplay between the instruments. Owen is brilliant at accompaniment – he doesn’t get in the way of the song but adds texture and really brings out the dramatic moments of the story. Once we got into the studio together, it was really natural – we just did a couple of takes and picked the best one, and that’s what you hear and see in the video single.
‘Rosa’ is released on Grimdon Records on 22nd July and is available via Bandcamp and on all streaming services.
You can also hear Rosa on our Regular Folk playlist on Spotify, which is also now available on Apple Music.
Live Dates
23/07 Warwick Folk Festival – Tickets
31/07-01/08 Sidmouth Folk Festival (Solo and with Sophie Crawford) – Tickets
13-14/08 White Horse Folk Festival, Oxfordshire – Tickets
For more, visit: www.georgesansome.co.uk