Artist of the Month
Martin Simpson talks to KLOF about “Some Kind of Jubilee”, the double album that marks fifty years since his debut. He talks about hope through nature, the power of instrumental music and more. “I feel like I’m a better musician now than I’ve ever been,” he says. “My chops are as good as they’ve ever been, although I’m not as flash as I used to be.”
Martin Simpson’s “Some Kind of Jubilee” is a seventeen-song double album, made in the US and the UK to mark half a century since his debut. Veterans and newcomers play alongside him. The music is rich without ever being overplayed, and the vocals are warm and engaging. The album is a real achievement and a career highlight. Take a bow.
Karine Polwart and Jackie Morris talk to KLOF Mag about Spell Songs’ “In Thin Air”. The record follows the Seven Wonders of Bird: nest, egg, beak, song, feather, flight and migration, and grew out of a week-long Pembrokeshire residency. Polwart discusses ecology, folk tradition and the importance of physical albums; Morris explains her live painting alongside the band on tour and her relationship with birds.
Spell Songs’ third studio album, In Thin Air, is a creative reaction to Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s The Book of Birds. Fifteen songs deal with different aspects of avian life, from nest-building to migration, building up a noticeable narrative thrust. Again and again, this album cleverly conflates the lives of birds with human experience. It is an album in constant fluttering movement, one that soars and sings.
Mama’s Broke’s Amy Lou Keeler and Lisa Maria discuss “Reunion,” their latest album, one of stark emotion and stunning but subtle playing. Born from Nova Scotian roots, Appalachian tradition and Eastern European influences, their deliciously dark folk resists easy labels. The pair talk origins, co-writing, folk as political expression, and the collective feeling that keeps their collaboration fresh after a decade on the road.
On “Reunion”, Mama’s Broke’s third album, Amy Lou Keeler and Lisa Maria touch the darkest aspects of human life with openness and admirable musical originality. The Nova Scotia duo weave Appalachian and Eastern European traditions into songs that touch on economic inequality, violence against women, and stunningly beautiful, lyrically enigmatic ballads in the spirit of Time (The Revelator)-era Gillian Welch. They find something worth saving in the dark.
We chat to Junior Brother, whose songs are known for veering between the intensely personal and the hotly political. On his third album, The End, the Dublin-based songwriter’s ragged and uncompromising delivery reaches new heights of unexpected beauty, strangeness and relevance. Throughout the interview, his answers to our questions were considered and wide-ranging.
On Junior Brother’s third album, The End, Ronan Kealy displays real genius in the way he links ancient themes, such as the album’s underlying central motif of fairy forts, to our contemporary plight. “we can do nothing other than hang on his every word, words that slip from calm to fervid to agonised. It’s a journey we are willing to take again and again.”
We chat to Ruth Clinton and Cormac MacDiarmada of Poor Creature about their debut album, All Smiles Tonight. A deep dive into its making, their influences (from the Cocteau Twins to Ellen Arkbro) and more. The album feels like a new high point in the constantly evolving experimental folk scene centred around Dublin and a thoroughly modern foray into ancient musical territory. But is it folk?
Tension, contrast and juxtaposition are words that inevitably come to mind at multiple points throughout All Smiles Tonight. Poor Creature are masters at harnessing that tension and creating soundworlds that are utterly compelling from start to finish. This is music that straddles darkness and light, and traverses the blasted terrain of loss in wholly unexpected ways, picking apart and reassembling the whole idea of folk music as it goes.
While she grew up in Yorkshire, Iona Lane’s new album, Swilkie, is a love song to Scotland’s islands and the people who live there, and an impassioned plea for the conservation of wild spaces and communities on the margins. A relative newcomer to the region, she spoke to KLOF about how she came to know and love her adopted homeland, and how it came to inform her music.