With a sound rich in the folk tradition, doused with a haunting dash of Americana, and layered with a maturity and intimate sensitivity that is very much their own, Bristol-based duo Fritillaries have delivered an introspective debut album (reviewed here) of evocative and beguiling songs. Recently Folk Radio UK grabbed a chat with Hannah and Gabriel, our current Artists of the Month, to talk band names, Bristol’s folk scene and the inspiration of gardening, but first of all, we chatted about how the duo came together.
“We’ve known each other from school,” explains Gabriel, “we’re both from Exmouth, in Devon, and we both played music. Hannah had started singing some songs at Exmouth folk club and I went along to see her once and then we started playing some songs and putting some songs together for that sort of setting – for pubs and stuff. It was quite a good way of getting served! It was a good incentive! And we had a good repertoire of Bob Dylan and Neil Young covers. Then we very, very slowly started to take it a bit more seriously. That would have been eight, maybe nine, years ago.”
“And then four years ago,” continues Gabriel, “by that point, we had a few of our own songs, and did some very basic recordings, then, yeah, only 18 months or so ago, we started thinking seriously about being in a place to do an album and we were happy with the material, so, a long, long, slow time coming!”
The duo previously performed under the moniker Rainy Day Woman, but in the process of planning their debut album, they started to consider adopting a new name, one which would reflect their organic and rustic sound. Inspiration came from close to home, as Hannah elaborates: “The name came from a poem that my mum wrote and she sent it to me about a year ago. It was about digging through the soil, and finding a sixpence, and on finding it, it brought up all these childhood memories for her. It also made her think about Sutton Hoo, the Saxon hoard in Suffolk, and it ignited her imagination in that way. It also made her think about childhood and her father’s childhood, both of my granddad’s were gardeners, and those kind of themes of working with the Earth, planting seeds, waiting for things to grow and then my mum’s own process of working through those memories and processing some things.”
We had a long period of not playing music, because of lockdown…So, the idea of these fritillaries coming out of the ground, these beautiful, chequered flowers, with a beautiful name, just fitted that whole experience and I love that it was something that my mum was part of.
“Then, in turn,” Hannah continues, “me processing those things in my own way, in my kind of lived experience, it all felt very relevant to what we had experienced and our musical journey. It takes a lot of time and patience, and it feels like gardening and it feels like waiting for things to come out of the ground that you don’t know are necessarily there. Sometimes they’re surprising, sometimes things don’t come up. We had a long period of not playing music, because of lockdown, and that was a really, really hard time, especially for me in lots of different ways. So, the idea of these fritillaries coming out of the ground, these beautiful, chequered flowers, with a beautiful name, just fitted that whole experience and I love that it was something that my mum was part of. I felt very connected to that whole process.”
“It was kind of an agonising process,” adds Gabriel, ”trying to come up with a band name and trying to change one when you already have one. Some people have lots of ideas about what a new name should be! Fritillaries is maybe not the easiest to spell, or remember, or pronounce, we got a lot of pushback!”
“It was a good lesson in sticking to your gut!” adds Hannah, “it was a good lesson in saying ‘this feels right’!”
Feel right it does, and not just for the listener. The album was primarily conceived over lockdown, an experience that most of us found challenging and certainly influenced Hannah’s writing.
“The album came out of a lot of personal darkness,” notes Hannah, “it’s kind of a bit of a cliche that you write your best music when you’re really fucking sad! I had a bit of extra strange experience in lockdown where I started experiencing a lot of random fatigue – I would be suddenly in bed for weeks on end not being able to get out – and accompanying some mental health stuff as well, which was pretty rough. Writing songs in that period was the most important thing to me really.”
“The song ‘Suspending’ came out of that time of feeling,” Hannah continues, “You can hear it comes from a pretty dark place of feeling very lost – feeling like you’re reaching for something, but you don’t know what, and you don’t know where it is – like being in a dark house and putting your hands along the wall and not knowing what you’re going to find. A lot of the album came out of experiencing that and trying to throw different perspectives on it, trying to process it mentally, trying to help myself get well again.”
With such few opportunities to play together during lockdown, Gabriel too found the experience challenging, but it also provided some interesting contrasts in the development of the songs’ arrangements: “Having that really quiet space”, notes Gabriel, “that very private space, in which the songs came to exist, was a really interesting journey for the arrangements to go on because we thought they’d became a bit more introspective and a lot quieter – very delicate. Since we’ve been called Fritillaries people often talk about how it’s a delicate flower and we’re a delicate flower of band, and that’s really true, it’s really gentle. We really enjoyed spending a lot of time with the melodies, luxuriating in those and letting the space sit there is what it’s about.”
“We bought a large diaphragm condenser microphone,” recalls Gabriel, “and were wanting to play around with it – bluegrass style – and then, as soon as lockdown finished, we had some headline gigs booked, and we started to use that setup and that was a really great way of conveying what we’ve been doing intimately to a wider audience, but it also changed the space in a big way, you can’t be that loud. You can hear a lot more room and space. It’s not like every instrument is playing right into your ears, it’s like you’re listening to a sort of moment. That really changed the live experience in a really big way. A lot of the sound came out of that moment.”
”The arrangement for ‘Little Bird,’” continues Gabriel, “which we recorded a version of with the wider ensemble and released as a single a while ago, the version of it that’s on the album is just the two of us. That’s the sparsest moment on the album, and that feels like a lot of what the live sound is. But it’s tricky, especially in a festival context, or if we’re opening for someone, technically it’s hard to get it loud sometimes but I think people really respond to it in a room that’s well set up for it. It becomes a really intimate live experience.”
“It was interesting,” notes Hannah, “a friend of mine said that she was listening to ‘Lost My Mind’ and she said that she felt like it was a future her reassuring her about the time that she was in, and I thought that was really lovely. It’s really nice when people come back to you with what they take from those songs, and that’s changed my view of what that song is.”
Fritillaries’ sound is an intimate one; Hannah and Gabriel on guitar, mandolin and banjo, but the album also features strings and piano and offered the duo the opportunity to experiment with a larger sound and the experience of playing with an ensemble, as Hannah says:
“That’s a new thing for us. We’ve never really played with that many other people and especially not in this ensemble, so it’s been a really exciting new challenge!”
“We did one gig – a launch gig in London – with band, the violin and the double bass and that was really special”, notes Gabriel. “At the Sheriff Centre,” continues Gabriel, “which is an old church in West Hampstead.”
“That was amazing,” adds Hannah, “It’s my favourite gig I’ve ever played! It’s a beautiful big space with stained glass windows amazing and high ceilings and it was really, really lovely.”
The Fritillaries sound casts a nod to the classic singer-songwriters; there is a definite vintage vibe on Fritillaries and one which suggests a number of evocative influences. “There’s a lot of classic seventies, singer-songwriter albums on there,” notes Gabriel, “I think ‘Head in Hands’ that came out of thinking about albums where feel like you’re listening to just a person in a room and maybe there’s a guitar there and a piano – singing songs like Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’”.
“The song ‘Together in Flight’, notes Hannah, “was quite interesting because we had that arranged to be a big, slightly rambunctious sound, with all of the different instruments…”
“There’s a version of that which is very Americana,” explains Gabriel, “with a really gnarly fiddle solo, and it’s really upbeat and bouncy, which came out of the version we’ve been doing as a duo.”
“Then in the studio,” continues Hannah, “Gabriel said ‘I really want to try something…’”
“There’s a Tim O’Brien song called ‘Foreign Lander’,” adds Gabriel, “from a solo album called Fiddler’s Green, which is just him singing with lots of bowed instruments and doing quite rhythmic things. It’s this really interesting drone and his voice takes on the quality of the bowed instruments. There’s a lot of a lot of plucking in our music, so I like the idea of there being a sort of droney song!”
“I had my harmonium as well,” adds Hannah, “and we just tried it out and in a few takes got the song ‘Together in Flight’ with the fiddle player paying like an octave violin (he only had three strings as well, because one of them broke!) but that was a really magical moment.”
“To me, the album has a sort of pastoral mystical, something or other to it,” adds Gabriel, “There are a couple of albums that I always talk about by Andrew Marlin, he did a couple of instrumental albums early last year. A lot of it is mandolin and fiddle playing in unison and it’s sort of an old timey American album with repeating solos and improvised solos. Really beautiful slower pieces that have this really mystical, floaty, organic feeling to them. They feel like they couldn’t have been anything other than people live in a space communicating with each other. That’s a big part of the good part of the recording. A lot of the songs were just live in the studio and if anything happened they benefitted from that.”
It’s clear, both in the beautiful melodies and musicianship on Fritillaries, as well as the ease in conversation between Hannah and Gabriel, that the duo have a very relaxed and trusting relationship – one which is natural and playful, developed over many years of performing together.
Turning to processes, Hanah explains, “I do most of the song-writing, and then Gabriel and I come together, edit the songs, think about how they’re going to be arranged and build it from there. A lot of the wider sound is Gabriel’s vision, the different instruments and the personality of the song, a lot of that is Gabriel’s creation. Whereas I’m more at the beginning, the conception of the songs.”
“The communication is great,” continues Hannah, “It’s amazing to feel so understood. We both get each other on a basic level, but at the same time we have individual identities and different things that we’re exploring musically – sometimes they come together, and sometimes they don’t, and it’s fine when they do and fine when they don’t.”
“The depth of the connection and the years adds an ease,” adds Gabriel, “and an understanding which is really useful. We’re on the same page – the song wants to get somewhere and everything will be geared to getting that, we don’t really have to second guess that, and I’m pleased how people are saying such nice things about the album!”
“It’s hard to tell when you are so deep in it!” agrees Hannah.
A Fritillaries tour is planned, with the duo playing across England and hopefully taking the album to Europe, but, for now, the duo remain based in their adopted home of Bristol, a city with a very rich and progressive music identity: “We’ve really loved making lots of new connections,” notes Hannah, “especially coming from Devon which is a very folky place, and Exmouth has quite strong folk roots as well. A lot of the reason we went into that music scene, or at least for me, was the set up for that – that you go and play your first song in the local folk club and that’s your first live performance. But then being in Bristol, where young people like folk music is quite exciting! It’s great and it’s so nice to be able to make lots of different connections with so many people. There are so many folk sessions going on and lots of great touring bands come through. We’ve been running a monthly folk/acoustic night in Old Market as well, and meeting a lot of really wonderful, great musicians through that. We’ve been able to build a lot of connections, which has been really fun, it’s been great!”
“We’re touring the album in September,” continues Hannah, “we’ve got three dates with the string band, and that’s in Bristol, Birmingham and Exmouth, and then lots of duo dates all over.”
“We’re in Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester,” adds Gabriel, “then back in London, then Margate and a few more, so that should be really good. We’re thinking about a few gigs in Europe – the Low Countries and Germany are a haven for the sort of music we do – we just need to see how these gigs go first. We shall see!”
The Fritillaries gently experimental, intimate and poignant sound has certainly been touched by the big city vibe of Bristol, but their Devon upbringing roots the duo in a rich folk tradition and colours the album with a timeless, vintage ambience. If your taste favours rootsy, soulful folk, then make sure you catch them.
Buy Fritillaries (Digital/CD/Vinyl) here: https://fritillaries.bandcamp.com/album/fritillaries
Website: https://fritillaries.uk/
Tour Dates & Ticket Links: https://fritillaries.uk/tour/