Assured debut album from The Shee’s Olivia Ross, supported by expert ensemble playing.
Olivia Ross has spent the last twenty years playing with The Shee, so Grace the Blue, her first solo album, feels like it’s been a long time coming. Working full-time as a music teacher for Highland Council left Olivia Ross little time for writing, but she says that: “changes to my work-life balance in 2020 allowed me to spend time writing and playing. I had always assumed that an album would consist mainly of traditional songs, so I was quite surprised to discover I had enough material to make up the bulk of the album.”
Grace The Blue is largely comprised of Olivia Ross’s own material, although it also includes two cover songs and a traditional number. Some of Ross’s Shee colleagues feature in the supporting cast of players, with Signy Jakobsdottir on drums and percussion and Laura Beth Salter on mandolin and backing vocals. The rest of the band lineup boasts further fine musicians, with Anna Massie on guitar, Rory Matheson on piano, James Lindsay on double bass and Calum Stewart on wooden flute and whistles. Even Ross’s Mum, Maureen, gets to provide backing vocals on the track, Hallelujah, as well as a special dedication in the form of the piano ballad, Morning Star.
The album opens with a song that makes a big impact, Little Steps, its tinkling piano and gently strummed mandolin providing the perfect foil before Ross’s terrific fiddle playing joins the mix. It’s a tune that celebrates the power of incremental progress – how it’s the thousands of little things that eventually make the difference. The song also extols the virtues of self-love and collaboration. What’s immediately apparent is the clarity of Ross’s diction and pronunciation, every word of her contralto voice capable of evoking great emotion. The waltz of Far From This World follows –opening with a slow shuffle – another song about the power of positive thinking and the desire to protect a loved one, asleep, perchance to dream.
For the single from the album, Ross decided to release Bleary Winter, a slow-paced song written by Hugh Lupton and Chris Wood about the Enclosures Act, which appeared on Wood’s 2005 album, The Lark Descending. In truth, Ross’s songwriting is strong enough to have released a number of her own compositions first. Particularly suitable would have been The ‘River, which bursts forth from the outset, led by its trilling flute, the song a metaphor for life being a journey like the flow of a river.
The expert ensemble playing on the uptempo instrumental, Beccy’s Big Day Out / Knoydart Ahoy!, and the slower-paced lament of Lost Inverlael provide a nice balance against the songs, and on the latter, Ross’s fiddle playing is particularly effective at conjuring a properly mournful mood – a suitably plaintive composition dedicated to the 55 households who were evicted from Inverlael Glen in the nineteenth century to make way for sheep farming.
The second cover on the album is The King’s Shilling. Thought by many to be a traditional number, it was actually written by Iain Sinclair, a poignant anti-war song sung from a woman’s perspective – the King’s Shilling, a coin that was a token of a soldier’s recruitment into the army. Its successor is a genuine traditional, Jock O’Hazeldean, written by Sir Walter Scott and previously covered by Dick Gaughan and Barbara Dickson. It’s another strong rendition before Ross concludes with a song she originally penned for The Shee’s debut album, A Different Season, back in 2008. For an album that features the winter months so strongly, it seems appropriate to end with a song that promises the prospect of better weather to come: “But soon time will move forward, the waiting over/And the sun will again soon nurture and heal/And those bitter bleak days they will long be forgotten, while we reap the rewards of a new season’s yield”.
Olivia Ross has a distinctive voice in all the best senses of the word, as well as being an expert fiddle player. Given the strength of her songwriting and ability to choose a lineup of the finest backing musicians, it’s to be hoped that the wait for her sophomore release is far shorter.
Order Grace the Blue via Bandcamp