Those of you familiar with Folklore Tapes and their ongoing explorations of the vernacular arcana of Great Britain and beyond may already be familiar with Bridget Hayden and her more experimental work. Her new album, Cold Blows the Rain, is a very different beast in which her vocals take centre stage over droney accompaniments provided by The Apparitions as she sings traditional folk songs that she’s known all her life.
The reinterpreted traditional folk songs featured on Cold Blows the Rain are shaped by the land and the weather. Wrapped in mist and drizzle, the crawling drone of low, heavy clouds on flat-top moors, the sound of the dark Calder Valley floor and sun-starved hills in West Yorkshire in the North of England. It’s apt that our introduction to this album is the traditional ballad, Lovely on the Water, which A.L. Lloyd once described as starting like a sunny day that clouds over1. The accompanying video features footage taken from ‘Films of Britain—British Council Film Department Catalogue—1940 – 1943’ that accentuates the timeless quality of Hayden’s remarkable voice.
Keeping things local, the album has also found a home on Todmorden label Basin Rock (Jim Ghedi, Michael Chapman, Juni Habel, Trevor Beales).
Cold Blows the Rain will be released on January 10, 2025, and is available to Pre-Order today on Digital/CD/Vinyl via Bandcamp and Basin Rock.
In Todmorden, the oddly-named market border town in West Yorkshire with a habit of embracing the weird and wonderful, a burst of sunshine is a precious thing. Through the thick of Winter, through every season in fact, the town’s folk are used to the wind and rain, fog and mist. As much a part of the town as the trademark deep valley it sits in, here, the lay of the land invites the weather in, just as it does the many musicians, artists, and unique characters that have come to call the place home over the centuries.
Bridget Hayden is one such soul who found a home among these hills. The experimental musician, who invites the ghosts in for the classic folk songs that make up her stunning new album, knows only too well about such weather and how rare and treasured the breaks from it are. Her favourite thing to do in the valley, she says, is “to make the most of every tiny minute of sunshine.”
Such aspirations nearly derailed the recording of Cold Blows the Rain, her new eight-song collection released via the Todmorden-based label Basin Rock. Having hired the town’s Oddfellow’s Hall to record these new songs in the late summer of 2022, Hayden says the weather was so good she ended up basking in every second of it, only moving inside to begin recording when the sun was setting, working deep into the night to make up the time.
There’s a good chance, however, that it had to be this way. The songs that make up Cold Blows the Rain are not made for sunlight. Instead, they come wrapped in mist and coated with drizzle, those elements shaping the album as much as the voice and the instruments held within, as real but ambiguous as the ghosts that linger in the shadows. The sound of the dark valley floor.
Mostly centred around meditative and experimental improvisation, Bridget’s work has seen her spend more than two decades recording and performing on the underground music scene. She’s also toured internationally both as a solo artist and as part of bands such as Schisms and The Telescopes, while working on various side-projects with the likes of Folklore Tapes.
For all of this sonic exploration, much of her work has been formed around elements of traditional folk aesthetics. Over time, she began to piece together a collection of reinterpreted traditional songs that she absorbed as a child from her mother: through The Dubliners and Muddy Waters to Bessie Smith and The Leadbelly Songbook. Harvesting her love for Nina Simone, Karen Dalton, Margaret Barry, and more, Bridget takes these traditional songs and transforms them into something uniquely evocative.
“It goes back to the womb,” Bridget says of that connection. “I would not call it a memory as it is so deep within my blood and bones. My mum was the source, she sang all the time, as part of life. So it was a very lulling and natural introduction. It seemed common to hear her singing – unbeknownst to her – in time with a raindrop dripping at the window,” Bridget continues. “I’ve always wanted to do a folk record as I love these songs so much. It comes much more naturally to me to sing other people’s words, especially when they’re as beautiful as these old verses.”
Underpinned by waves of analogue reverb and led by Bridget’s stirring and weather-beaten voice, the songs on Cold Blows the Rain drift and crawl like low, heavy clouds on flat-top hills shaped by the land. The backdrop is equally as arresting, all subtle gloom cast in shadow, a gentle but pronounced swirling of textures crafted from harmonium and violin courtesy of The Apparitions (Sam Mcloughlin and Dan Bridgewood-Hill).
“The weather speaks the most eloquently about human loss,” Bridget says, articulating such sentiments. “It’s good to feel enveloped by something so much vaster than ourselves. The rain and the tears all become one.”
Cold Blows the Rain (10th January 2025) Basin Rock
Pre-Order today on Digital/CD/Vinyl via: Bandcamp and Basin Rock.