Looking for the Thread brings together Julie Fowlis, Karine Polwart, and Mary Chapin Carpenter, a project born out of the tail end of Covid, initiated by Carpenter, who felt the time was right for a collaborative venture. She’d previously worked with Fowlis on the Transatlantic Sessions, and Fowlis, in turn, has worked with Polwart on several occasions, including the much-loved Spell Songs project.
Looking for the Thread was produced by Bonny Light Horseman’s Josh Kaufman, who also plays guitar and keys, with guest backing instrumentation from Rob Burger on keys, drummer Chris Vatalaro (drums, percussion), and bassist Cameron Ralston (bass) as well as Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh (The Gloaming) on the Hardanger d’Amore, a ten-string fiddle.
It’s a highly atmospheric work, opening with a piano, shimmering percussion and drone close-harmony rendition of the Gaelic traditional Gradh Geal Mo Chridhe, recorded for the funeral of Fergie MacDonald, the renowned Scottish accordionist who died last April, the number being his favourite song.
The first of the originals comes from Carpenter, A Heart That Never Closes, a steady shuffling love song founded on reminiscence and mortality: “yesterday is in the rear view, you don’t understand/How fast it all goes, need to catch your breath/Time is just a bandit trying to steal what’s left”) and “learning what to keep and what to let go of” as she recalls “acorns in the fall, old camp blankets/Wood smoke in my clothing, maples that I planted/Irises in summer, and a heart that catches/The screen door that’s always missing its latches… the noise that filled the kitchen on some new year’s eve/Forgotten resolutions that I never believed in/The silence in the hall at the end of the day/That says we’re alone but it doesn’t feel that way”.
There songs written from unique perspectives, the first being Polwart’s Rebecca, a piano-based, circling acoustic guitar patterned and gently harmonised number which, again dealing with the theme of time passing, is sung in the voice of a century-old beech tree weathering a recent attack (“Write your name upon me, Rebecca/Leave your mark in the old bark like a love letter/Trace your fingers along the scars where the cold steel blade tried to cut me down…They will never truly heal but I can seal them/They will never truly heal but here I am and I am still growing”).
The second is Fowlis’s Silver In The Blue, which, with hazy keyboards and muted march beat percussion, is about the journey of the endangered wild Atlantic salmon (“the pull of Northern latitudes, guided by earth and moon, to otherworlds you go/a thousand miles from these shores”). And the third is Carpenter’s Satellite which, opening with a forlorn whistle and discordant percussive notes before the piano sets in, is sung in the persona of a decommissioned NASA ‘zombie spaceship’, launched in 1978 and betrayed after 37 years of loyal work, condemned to drift forever in space (“Thrusters useless, fuel used up/Contact lost, completely fucked/Unless they send someone at last/To try and catch me as I pass”) rather than returning to Earth to be displayed (“the brass they disapproved of my ambitions/So after all these years of silence I still listen/Between fever dreams of static and transmissions”). When Carpenter sings, “every journey that begins should have an ending”, like Fowlis’s song, the metaphor’s not hard to see.
Written by Carpenter, the reflective, wearily sung title track with its spare piano notes, Fowlis’s whistle, marching drum beat and percussive clicks shares a theme of searching for connection and direction (“All the lives we learn to shed/Like leaves from trees before the winter…Old letters never read, old grudges burned to embers/Migrations overhead, the beating wings of purple vespers/Did you jump or were you led and does it even really matter/You’re just looking for the thread /That ties it all together”).
A similar theme is explored in Polwarts Hold Everything, a song partly inspired by John Berger’s book Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance, offering a meditation on death and the different ways it comes (Could you hear the car coming/Did you stumble and fall?/Did you sleep without waking?/Were you ready to go?/Or did you feel the tightening pain in your chest?/Did you lie down that morning and pray for eternal rest?”), through accident, natural causes, and murder as she asks, “Were you half way through coffee/when he broke down the door?/Did you hear the brake sing as you stepped on the line?/Could you tell by the look in his eye that he’d do it this time?… Were you swaddled in morphine? /Was she stroking your hair?…Were you pleading for mercy or begging for bread?/Were you shielding your children or lying alone in your bed?”
There is one co-written track, You Know Where You Are, a collaboration between Polwart and frequent collaborator composer Pippa Murphy and another purposeful annual migration number, here with avian imagery (“Little bird – of bone and feather/you leave behind the coming weather… you ride the night dark across the ocean … you catch the tail of an updraught blowing…the constellations guide you home”).
Arranged by Fowlis, the penultimate track is another Gaelic traditional, the slow-paced, sparsely rendered, melancholically sung Buidheann mo chridhe Clann Ualraig, an obscure poem included in Alexander Maclean Sinclair’s anthology Mactella Nan Tur. It ends with one final Carpenter contribution, the unambiguous call to Send Love to yourself in times of doubt, loss, exhaustion and despair, “when all you’ve got is not enough to get you through the day …your candles burnt down to the wick, no fuel for a flame …dreams that never had a chance, they finally let you go”, and it feels that “we move so fast we don’t know where we’ve even been…some lives don’t so much as start before they end”.
Looking for the Thread offers a captivating meeting of different but kindred musical minds from different genres and cultures coming seamlessly together with shared themes and emotions, all three can be proud of what their collaboration has produced while audiences can but hope for a sequel that sees them sharing the writing process as well as performance.
Looking for the Thread (24th January 2025) Lambent Light Records