Natalie Wildgoose has shared the video for River Days, the latest single from her forthcoming EP, Rural Hours, due April 15th via state51.
With visuals by Nina Maria Moslechner, the footage is a natural match for Wildgoose’s analogue sensibility: already carrying the texture of something retrieved rather than recorded. Since our review of Come Into the Garden — where we noted how her recordings hold “the unlearnable language of dream and memory” — she has continued to make that instinct her defining quality.
River Days is a diaristic account of a midsummer day spent entirely by water. The lyrics catch it obliquely, through sensation rather than description — “Still smell the smoke on your face / Made a fire from a part of a rock / It’s 11 at night and it’s not dark.” The track moves with the bouncy looseness of a day that has no agenda, before landing on something more tender: “Tell the angels I’m done,” the particular exhaustion of a day fully inhabited, sunburnt shoulders the quiet proof.
Wildgoose wrote the song on the same evening it describes.
“This song is a record of a single day, written that same evening, capturing the events and feelings of an early-summer day when Matt and I spent every hour by the river. We lit fires and made black coffee in the naturally worn rockpools of the stone, in the evening we cooked fresh trout and lay in the grass beds where the deer had slept the night before. I fell asleep to the sounds of the waterfalls we had stumbled across on our wanderings, and then later, in the shower, I noticed my shoulders were burned, not badly, just a small sting. Proof I had lived a little, but that would fade in a week.”
It’s a quote that gets to the heart of what makes her music so affecting — the impulse to record something transient before it fades. Rural Hours sits perfectly alongside the previously shared Nobody on the Path on an EP that also draws on Emily Dickinson’s letters and the Sibylline oracle of Ancient Greece.
Rural Hours was recorded between a Village Hall in North Yorkshire, direct to tape, and a bothy high in the Yorkshire Dales — two hours from the nearest village, without heating or electricity. This latest single sits alongside the previously shared Nobody on the Path on an EP that also draws on Emily Dickinson’s letters and the Sibylline oracle of Ancient Greece.
Wildgoose heads out on a run of UK dates next month supporting L.Y.R. — the trio fronted by poet laureate Simon Armitage — before a landmark headline show at Stoke Newington Old Church in May and festival appearances at The Great Escape and Deer Shed across the summer.
Pre-Order Rural Hours: https://nataliewildgoose.bandcamp.com/album/rural-hours
Upcoming live shows:
16 APR // Cambridge, Storey’s Field Centre*
17 APR // Kendal, Brewery Arts*
18 APR // Liverpool, The Tung Auditorium*
19 APR // Birmingham, Bradshaw Hall*
21 APR // Nottingham, Squire Performing Arts Centre*
22 APR // Glasgow, Cottiers Theatre*
23 APR // Leeds, Brudenell Social Club (supporting Chris Brain)
24 APR // York, Pocklington Arts Centre*
25 APR // Hebden Bridge, Trades Club*
14 MAY // The Great Escape
19 MAY // London, Stoke Newington Old Church [Headline]
24-26 JUL // Deer Shed Festival
* Supporting LYR