‘Sometimes when people ask what kind of music I play, I say “sad folk music”.’
Amelia Baker, the singer, musician and writer behind Cinder Well, is disarmingly honest. But behind that honesty lies an intriguing depth and complexity: the more you listen to Cadence, her extraordinary new album (reviewed here), the more you realise that the word ‘sometimes’ is doing an awful lot of work. Yes, her trademark minor keys and dark, glacial shifts are there in abundance, but so too is a new-found openness, a receptiveness to change. Cadence doesn’t attempt to seal up the cracks where the light gets in. It is an album that juxtaposes Western Ireland’s strange, ancient landscapes with the sunbaked California coast: two places with marked differences and subtle similarities.
Baker, an American who has spent much of her recent life abroad, explains it like this: ‘I was going back and forth a lot between Ireland and California while working on this album so I leaned into that, a space between kind of feeling. I just wanted to keep writing songs but I was in a time of a lot of transitions both personally and in terms of location. I find the consistency between the two west coasts to be comforting while I go between places. I’ve gotten really into surfing again, and I love seeing the two landscapes from the vantage point of the water. The castles off the coast of Clare are very different from the train tracks and mountains off the coast of Southern California, but being at the coast always helps me get my bearings.’
A definite SoCal vibe seeps into these new songs, something rooted in the storied musical heritage of the area, and Baker is keen to acknowledge her debt to Laurel Canyon’s golden era: ‘My family raised me on music of that era – Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead, The Band, and Neil Young, Crosby Stills and Nash. But Neil and Joni are big ones for me, the timelessness of Neil Young, and Joni’s lyrics being so poetic.’
Mitchell’s influence, in particular, looms large over Cadence. Baker has developed as a lyricist, and like Joni, one of her great strengths is her ability to create an interesting and unusual sense of place. And while her songwriting is very place-conscious, it is not rooted to a specific location or locations.
‘It’s important to me that it feels honest and genuine to where I am at,’ she explains. ‘Like an extension of myself. But as I am moving around so much these days, I can’t nail it down to any specific place, I’m trying to stay in the creative process wherever I am.’
Cadence feels like a big undertaking: big on ideas, big on creativity, and expansive in terms of sound. And if there is an overriding theme to the album, it might be creativity itself or the difficulties encountered when the creative urge threatens to desert us. These are fluid, organic and often sea-bound songs that seem to explore the place of the creative mind in the natural world. As Baker says, ‘I didn’t have big themes in mind at the outset, but I wanted to keep writing music to get myself out of a pretty big creative block. So there’s some words of encouragement to the self in there, like in the title track. And some lyrics about love and ageing and the passage of time in Overgrown and Gone the Holding.’
These are things that many artists have stopped to consider in the wake of the Covid pandemic. Cadence has the feel of something emerging from a crisis, not unscathed or unchanged, but experienced and more cognisant of the processes that govern artistic creation. Everyone had a different experience of the pandemic, and Baker’s was initially disheartening but eventually hopeful.
‘One effect of the pandemic is that I spent more time back home in California than I had ever expected or planned to, and the process of reconnecting there influenced this album a lot. I questioned doing music at all during the early days of the pandemic, but somehow came re-committed to writing, playing and teaching. The first gigs I went to and played when gigs started happening again were impactful, it was overwhelming feeling things in a room with other people again. I think we may have quickly de-sensitized to that initial excitement, and it’s very difficult to make it work in the world as a musician. But I think I’m a believer again in the importance of creating art and gathering around it.’
Perhaps as a result of this regained positivity, Cadence has a sunnier sound than previous Cinder Well albums (which were more deserving of the ‘dark folk’ tag some critics saddled them with). ‘I like having a visual in my mind’s eye throughout the time I’m working on an album,’ Baker says. ‘For No Summer it was the dingy yellow street lights on grey concrete in Ennis, where I lived at the time. But with Cadence it was winter sunsets over the ocean, where the light is a gradient from purple to orange. I wasn’t intending to have a very strong divergence from the last album, but I did want to evolve and be flexible to newer sounds and approaches to recording.’
These new approaches were achieved with the help of Lankum’s Cormac MacDiarmada, who provides the striking string arrangements for Cadence. Baker met the Irish drone/folk/punk pioneers at a Dutch anarcho-folk festival ten years ago, and their careers have been loosely intertwined ever since. At the time, she was ‘completely blown away by Lankum’s music. It was kind of like what we were doing but so rooted in a tradition, and I had never experienced that kind of tradition before. I went to visit them in Ireland after the tour and then pursued learning Irish traditional music on the fiddle.
‘I love working with Cormac,’ she continues. ‘Its just so fun to spend time with him, but also he thinks of things to do with strings that I just literally could never imagine coming up with. It’s like mind-bending, and it was such a joy to have him add that creativity to the album.’
As well as Lankum’s influence, she is also ‘very inspired’ by Anna Mieke’s new album, Theatre, and Dublin-based singer Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin’s experiments with traditional Irish song. Literary influences include T.S. Eliot and Haruki Murakami (‘his writing creates such strong visuals and senses, he mixes the ordinary with magic and you don’t even know where the lines got crossed’). Such lofty antecedents come as no surprise when you give Cadence a close listen: the lyrics have an assured poetic bent which is both deceptive and distinctive. Sad folk music, maybe, but Cinder Well’s songs are much more besides.
‘Cadence” is out April 21 on Free Dirt Records – https://lnk.to/cadence
CINDER WELL TOUR DATES
EU
MAY 13 – Uppsala, SE – Uppsala Konsert & Kongress
IE
MAY 18 – Kilkenny, IE – Cleere’s
MAY 19 – Dublin, IE – The Cobblestone
MAY 20 – Dublin, IE – The Cobblestone
MAY 26 – Cork, IE – Coughlan’s
MAY 27 – Waterford, IE – Phil Grimes
UK
SEPT 2 – End of the Road Festival
Website: https://cinderwellmusic.com
BANDCAMP: https://cinderwell.bandcamp.com/album/cadence