Amelia Baker, aka Cinder Well, recently headed to NPR’s offices to perform a Tiny Desk Concert, which you can watch below. Joined by Marit Schmidt (on vocals, viola) and Phillip Rogers (on vocals, drums), she performed three tracks from her latest album Cadence, released in 2023 and the title track of her 2020 release, No Summer.
An album about the journeys we make through life, Cadence is itself something of a journey. Meandering, non-linear, but full of care and wisdom, it is an astonishingly powerful piece of work that seems to have been conceived in uncertainty but realised with the supreme assurance of one of the most consummate songwriters around.
– Thomas Blake, KLOF Mag
Cinder Well Tiny Desk Set List
- Two Heads, Grey Mare
- Overgrown
- No Summer
- Crow
KLOF Mag Interview (Extracts)
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.’
…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.’
Cinder Well Upcoming Dates
MAR 21 THU – Balor Arts Centre, Ballybofey, Ireland
MAR 22 FRI – The Duncairn, Belfast, N. Ireland
MAR 23 SAT – Dublin Unitarian Church, Dublin, Ireland
MAR 24 SUN – Roisin Dubh, Galway, Ireland
MAR 29 FRI – Coughlans Bar, Cork, Ireland
MAR 30 SAT – Mikes Beach Shop and Cafe, Pier Gates, Ireland
MAY 31 FRI – Prepare The Ground 2024, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Tickets: https://cinderwellmusic.com/tour