For Iona Lane, community and music are inextricably tied to ecology and landscape, and in Swilkie, she has created an album that celebrates that link and calls for us all to recognise its importance.
The use and abuse of our planet and its natural resources is a subject close to the heart of countless artists and musicians. Ever since the first developer paved paradise and put up a parking lot, ecology has been a battleground, and musicians have been on the front line. Folk music – with its intrinsic ties to nature and heritage and place – has had a particularly large part to play in the fight to preserve our wild spaces and natural environments. In 1932, a seventeen-year-old Ewan MacColl wrote The Manchester Rambler after experiencing the Kinder Mass Trespass; it was perhaps the first song to forge a direct link between politics, ecology and land use. Since then, a long line of folk-adjacent performers, from Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Malvina Reynolds to Sam Lee and Johnny Flynn, via John Prine, Joni Mitchell and John Denver, have foregrounded environmental issues in their work.
Recently, there has been an evolution towards a more immersive and holistic brand of ecological music. Artists have been increasingly keen to engage with specific locations, encouraging deep listening utilising field recordings and local narratives to embellish their connection with a landscape. Jenny Sturgeon is one of the most successful recent advocates of this approach; her 2024 album paths.made.walking was a triumphant celebration of the Scottish landscape. It comes as no surprise to see Sturgeon listed as a backing vocalist on Iona Lane’s new album, Swilkie.
Lane is a songwriter based in the Highlands, and her practice revolves around the conservation and ecology of her native wild places. She set out her stall on her sparkling, assured debut album Hallival (2021), and on Swilkie, she ventures even deeper into the countryside, the myth and the history of Scotland’s islands and their diverse communities. The material for Swilkie was written on three separate island residencies: on Eigg, Mull, and the third largest of the Orkneys, Sanday. This writing process has many benefits. Most importantly, it enables Lane to compose songs from multiple, often unusual, perspectives. Lead single Torus, for example, concerns the historical relationship between people and basking sharks. It becomes a kind of miniature epic, charting our changing views towards the sharks, from sea monsters to marketable resources to valuable components of an ecosystem. If that sounds dry and academic, it really isn’t: Lane is a gifted storyteller, and her acoustic guitar playing is expressive and forthright, recorded in intimate detail by producer Andy Bell.
Big Skies has a gentle, loping country-folk vibe, full of nostalgia for vanishing wildernesses. Drummer Signy Jakobsdottir provides a minimal, sympathetic beat, and Malin Lewis’s fiddle infuses the song with a dreamy, melancholic kind of beauty. Wild Things Grow is more hopeful in its outlook, a bright, gentle, lilting song about the possibility of renewal and the resilience of plants. Albatross is a perfect example of how to translate a very specific historical event into a song with universal appeal. In this case, the event is the appearance, in the early 1970s, of an albatross on the coasts of the northern Shetland Islands. Lane brings tenderness and humour to her subject, resulting in narratives that are full of clear-eyed detail and which often revel in their own strangeness.
The title track displays a more sonically adventurous streak. Eerie drones give way to a wash of percussion and synth, and Jen Austin’s skeletal piano drops in and out. The lyrics form a list of items foraged from the beach in the wake of shipwrecks, and the Swilkie mentioned in the title is the name of the treacherous tidal current that flows in the part of the Pentland Firth that includes the islands of Stroma and Swona. The song’s list-like structure makes it feel like a distant and wild cousin of Lisa Knapp’s Shipping Song, and the items themselves tell a tale that is full of bizarre detail: tables and telescopes, grandfather clocks and slot machines. Another list song, Lichen, itemises various forms of lichen by their colloquial and local names, providing a snapshot of both ecology and language, and highlighting how the two can inform each other.
The sea’s beauty and danger are never far away in Lane’s songs. Boat Song recognises the romantic allure of a coastal storm but also the practical difficulties it can cause to communities when boats are cancelled. The melody is beautifully simple, a blustery lullaby. Washed Up takes a different, more complex approach, telling the mythical story of an older woman trapped in the belly of a whale. It’s told from the point of view of the Granny, who seems delighted with her adventure until she encounters the bewildering array of plastic pollution. Lane’s gift for combining sheer entertainment with a moral message is clearly on show here. The song jumps along with a winning, indie-pop bounce, but doesn’t fail to get its ecologically important message across.
Elsewhere, her songs are exercises in close looking. Staffa describes the island, its puffins, and its basalt columns with loving exactitude. It makes the moment when you realise it’s a song about longing and the idea of home even more powerful. Silent tells an equally powerful story, bringing to life the biographies of three different woman lighthouse keepers in all their tragedy and heroism. Curlew captures all of the wildness and melancholy of the bird of its title to tell the moving story of one of Lane’s friends. Alex Lyon’s versatile clarinet provides a mournful backing. The final track, Feed the Sea, takes a piece of fisherman’s wisdom – ‘if the sea feeds you, why do you not feed the sea’ – and turns it into a convincing mantra for a viable way to live alongside the world, sharing rather than abusing the resources at hand.
Taken alone, Swilkie is a masterful album full of heartfelt emotion and breathtaking songwriting, but there is an added bonus for those who buy the physical or Bandcamp versions: an extra disc’s worth of live recordings that allow a glimpse behind the curtain and into Lane’s singular recording process. It casts the whole album as a journey from solo endeavour to collaboration, from the bud of an idea to a fully-realised work of art. These live takes contain a different kind of beauty, a ramshackle appeal that further enforces the importance of place in Lane’s work: you can almost feel the energy of the crofts, chapels, cabins and school halls where these versions were recorded, and it is a timely reminder that music – and folk music in particular – needs a community in order to thrive. For Lane, community and music are inextricably tied to ecology and landscape, and in Swilkie, she has created an album that celebrates that link and calls for us all to recognise its importance.
Swilkie (May 2nd, 2025) Self Released
Pre-Order Swilkie (DL/Double CD & Ltd Ed. Vinyl + Songbook) – https://ionalane.bandcamp.com/album/swilkie
Upcoming Tour Dates
Tickets: https://www.ionalane.com/live
03/05/25 – Fraugde Church, Odense DENMARK
04/05/25 – House Concert, Faaborg DENMARK
06/05/25 – Tonfink, Lübeck GERMANY
07/05/25 – Homeyers Hof, Garbsen GERMANY
08/05/25 – Dominikanerkloster Prenzlau, Prenzlau GERMANY
09/05/25 – Scala House Concerts, Chemnitz GERMANY
10/05/25 – Katharinenkirche, Oelsnitz/vogtl. GERMANY
13/05/25 – Folkclub Prisma, Pforzheim GERMANY
15/05/25 – Haus Eifgen, Wermelskirchen GERMANY
17/05/25 – Cultureel Trefpunt Voorne aan Zee, Hellevoetsluis NETHERLANDS
18/05/25 – Kleine Walhalla, Rotterdam NETHERLANDS
SCOTLAND & ENGLAND
29/05/25 – Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal
31/05/25 – The Lost ARC, Rhayader
01/06/25 – Tree House Bookshop, Kenilworth
04/06/25 – Ashburton Arts Centre, South Devon
05/06/25 – The Acorn, Penzance
08/06/25 – Cafe #9, Sheffield
09/06/25 – Lightship, Blyth
10/06/25 – Alnwick Playhouse
11/06/25 – Lakeside Arts, Nottingham
12/06/25 – Unicorn Theatre, Abingdon
13/06/25 – Ilkley Manor House, Yorkshire
16/06/25 – Tonbridge Folk Club
17/06/25 – Colchester Folk Club
18/06/25 – Green Note, London
19/06/25 – Rosslyn Court, Margate
20/06/25 – Canopy Theatre, Beccles
21/06/25 – Deepdale Camping, Norfolk
24/06/25 – Hoy at Anchor Folk Club
25/06/25 – Redbourne Folk Club
26/06/25 – The Rankin Club, Leominster
27/06/25 – St Anne’s Church, Bewdley
28/06/25 – Violets Tea Room, Bridgnorth
30/06/25 – Lowther Pavilion, Lytham St. Annes
03/07/25 – Tolbooth, Stirling
05/07/25 – Knockvologan, Isle of Mull
06/07/25 – Resipole Studio, Acharacle
11/07/25 – The Ceilidh Place, Ullapool
18/07/25 – Knoydart Community Hall, Knoydart
31/07/25 – Gregson Arts & Community Centre, Lancaster
