Neil Morton
FEATURED SONG OF THE WEEK
Open Curtain: George Boomsma
We asked you earlier in the year to remember the name George Boomsma. Here’s another reminder and further evidence of his burgeoning talent as a singer, songwriter and musician. Our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com is Open Curtain, the closing track of his debut full album The Promise Of Spring.
Our initial choice was the captivating Cashmere Grey, a single released as a teaser for the album. Open Curtain is another poignant track: in fact the whole album is bathed in sadness, a reflection on grief and how to cope with loss, dedicated to Boomsma’s brother Tom and a life cut cruelly short.
‘Open Curtain is a song I wrote about a conversation I had once with a good friend, about how it can sometimes feel impossible, daunting and a bit futile when trying to express grief,’ says the Northallerton multi-instrumentalist. ‘Even though you'll never do it justice, just give it a go anyway.’
With so much to fear in the world just now and despair over what humanity can inflict upon itself, it is tempting to hide behind the curtains in the morning. When personal loss has been suffered, it’s even harder to face the day. Boomsma offers empathy and more than a little hope…
Now someone has offered a way I should try
Just give it a go and have nothing to hide
That's all well and good when you've got things to share
No man alive wants to be heard in despair
So how can I open the curtain
The curtain is already open
For all its melancholy, the album has an uplifting glow. It represents an upgrade sonically from previous EP releases, with Boomsma’s precise, versatile vocals and finger-style wizardry accompanied by a full band whose sweeping but subtle production elevates the music to new heights.
The version of Open Curtain we feature here is a live cut, recorded on the album launch night at The Regal in Tenbury Wells in April, with Boomsma on acoustic guitar, Will Looms on impressively atmospheric electric guitar, Bart Debney-Davies on bass and Ally McDougal on drums.
Boomsma will not mind the parallels with Nick Drake and the avant garde, jazz-inflected troubadours of the Sixties and Seventies. There are strains of psychedelia on this track too as the Yorkshireman slides gracefully in and out of falsetto.
The physical copies of the album are notable for fragments of George's childhood family recordings linking the tracks, enhancing the sense of nostalgia and reflecting the deeply personal nature of this eight-song collection.
Elsewhere Jack Gillen contributes on electric guitar, Adam Ridley on Wurlitzer and
Nick Cowan on organ with Harry Fausing Smith conducting string arrangements. Boomsma himself plays guitar, piano, keyboards, bass and percussion.
Not forgetting that understated voice: such a beautiful instrument in itself. Balm for the soul in a turbulent world.
The Ride (The Winter Yards): Steve Knightley
Show Of Hands frontman Steve Knightley has a new hand to show, a fresh direction to reveal. Our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com is The Ride (The Winter Yards), the near-as-damn-it title track from a solo album the musician regards as a career landmark.
The Winter Yards, his first solo set for 17 years and scheduled for release on October 4 with a 32-date tour to follow, is notable for the broader influences Knightley draws on. The folk tradition is never too far from the surface but Americana is now digging him in the ribs. It could be here to stay.
‘The album marks a significant departure for me, both musically and personally,’ says the Devon-based Knightley. ‘Inspired more by the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits and Peter Gabriel, The Winter Yards reflects a fresh journey, venturing more into urban and transatlantic soundscapes. But while it explores uncharted territory I believe it stays true to the voice I’ve always had, finding new ways to tell stories that matter.’
Ah, that alluring West Country voice, always hitting the bittersweet spot when it’s telling a good or grim tale, the lyric poignant or biting, or both. On the album he deals with the migration crisis and the Post Office scandal as well as the travelling life - or maybe that should be strife.
The Ride was created as a lament during lockdown, ‘a time when we all felt the profound loss of connection, community and live entertainment’. Knightley used the metaphor of a family-run country fair to convey a yearning for shared experiences, inspired by a father and son fairground business that was unable to leave its winter yards for two summers during the pandemic. He thanks his friend Josh Podbury ‘who, with his experience of working the loads, provided the practical language and poetic imagery that helped bring this song to life’. Even in hard times Knightley unearths a little hope…
I don’t believe my way of life has passed
With the smell of dust and diesel and the new-mown grass
The tilt, the flash, the build-up, the pulling down
I miss the moving days with the marking out the ground
Now it’s over…
There’s one thing every showman knows
People need a place to go
For a film, a fair, a dance, a show
Where they can dance and sing
Then I’ll drag my weary father to his feet
I’ll say: Look, the summer’s here and there are people in the street
Oh, this locked-down winter yard is no
place to hide
Knightley, who plays guitar, cuatro and mandocello on the album, explains: ‘I’ve spent much of my career weaving the West Country and English landscapes into my music, seeking to capture the essence of rural life and the stories that define it. But with Show Of Hands now on sabbatical, I’ve found myself at a crossroads - a moment to pause, reflect, and consider new directions.‘
Although the band, formed in 1986, has been parked for the moment, Knightley’s multi-instrumentalist partner Phil Beer, a mean fiddler, contributes to the shifting sounds along with long-time producer Mark Tucker, Phillip Henry on dobro and harmonica, Madrid-based combo Track Dogs, dhol drum and tabla player Johnny Kalsi, stalwart collaborator Matt Clifford on keyboards, Cornish sisters True Foxes and The Lost Sound Dartmoor Folk Choir who sing on the other album appetiser Knightley served up, Requiem.
The glorious track was premiered by KLOF magazine. You will recognise the tune (The Parting Glass) but the words were originally penned for Show of Hands’ 2014 Great War Centenary album. Knightley says: ‘The haunting and beautiful voices of The Lost Sound Dartmoor Folk Choir, under the direction of Sandra Smith, accompany me here. I’m deeply grateful to Sandra for her masterful arrangements, which add a layer of poignancy and depth to the song.’
Knightley’s gifts as a social commentator have long been admired. The Guardian once described him as ‘the gravel-voiced spokesman of the rural poor'. Honey as much as gravel, we suggest. Mother Tongue, a moving song inspired by the impact of the Brexit vote, is a former Song Of The Week here, a standout from Show Of Hands’ 18th studio album Battlefield Dance Floor in 2019. The song, about displacement, identity, nationality and sense of place, was a collaboration between Knightley, who once taught refugee children in London, and Kalsi. A track as memorable as his acclaimed putdown of those reviled bankers, Arrogance Ignorance and Greed.
His band may be idle hands for now but the old values remain a force as a reinvigorated Knightley enters a new territory of textures. A departure has arrived.
Already Gone: Willie Watson
The song is called Already Gone but, in many ways, the singer has only just arrived. After nigh on 30 years in the music business Willie Watson has released his first solo album of largely original material, appropriately self-titled.
There are only faint reminders of the band he founded with Ketch Secor in 1998 and left in 2011, The Old Crow Medicine Show, and we hear strains of Dylan, Van Zandt, Arlo Guthrie, Jim Croce, Danny O’Keefe and other rugged troubadours down the decades. But Watson, a high school dropout from Watkins Glen, upstate New York, has a world-weary sound of his own and that lived-in tenor has a gritty charm.
The 44-year-old Watson, who has enjoyed collaborations with the Watkins Family, John Prine and Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, wrote the track, our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, with actress-songwriter Morgan Naylor and Punch Brothers’ Gabe Witcher who produced the album with Kenneth Pattengale of the Milk Carton Kids. The singer-songwriter, poet, actor and multi-instrumentalist is addressing himself in a confessional tale of regret, heartbreak and emotional damage.
Pictures of before and after
Warning eminent disaster
But the message never made it through
All that’s lost is all that’s left of you
Don’t remember how to light the spark
Hearing voices whisper in the dark
Can’t stop doing what you can’t undo
Gone is all that you believe is true
What are you waiting for
Standing in the doorway
Stretching out the moment
Before it falls apart
You already know
That no one can stay here
There’s no hearts to break here
They’re already gone
‘The song seems to be a centrepoint of the whole record,’ says Watson. ‘It’s a guy just trying to look at himself in the mirror and it’s hard. I’ve tried not to look too close but if I can stop tearing myself apart inside for two seconds, get a little closer and just look… sometimes I hear a gentler voice. As for the video, you caught me at the right moment. Those big camera lenses are just mirrors if you get close up.’
Wasted, watching as the time transpires
Torn and tattered but you never tire
When the sun comes shining into view
All that’s left are shadows haunting you
‘This record is me beating the devil, or the story of what finally did it anyway. I didn’t make any specific pact or anything but I know we’ve been tangled up most of my life. Now that he’s gone I can love myself again.’ Speaking of the devil, the engaging opening track is entitled Slim And The Devil, an adaptation of Sterling A Brown’s poem Slim Greer In Hell.
Drummer Jason Boesel also receives a writing credit on Already Gone. The backing band for the album, recorded in Los Angeles, is completed by guitarist Dylan Day, Punch Brothers’ Paul Kowert on bass and The Heartbreakers’ Benmont Tench on keyboards. There are cameos too from fiddler Sami Braman and bassist Sebastian Steinberg. Watson, no relation to bluegrass guru Doc Watson who championed the talents of Old Crow Medicine Show, plays guitar, banjo, fiddle and harmonica.
There are two beautifully played old-time songs, Harris And The Mare and Mole In The Ground, which recall his Old Crow days and his two solo Rawlings-produced albums of old American folk interpretations, but it is the original compositions, the modern rather than the ancient, which stand out: Already Gone, the Band-esque Real Love, One To Fall and Play It One More Time (echoes of Gordon Lightfoot here) are bewitching ballads in which Watson plays the disarmingly candid storyteller.
Real Love is dedicated to his wife Mindy. ‘It kinda turned out to be the story of my life and it’s clear now that she’s standing in the center of everything. We’ve been looking for each other for a long time and now we can’t even remember all the struggle it took to get here.’ That struggle is navigated further in the closing track, Reap ’Em In The Valley, a talking-blues, autobiographical tour de force.
Why has he waited this long to get personal and step into the glare with songs of hidden depth? His website tells of excesses that took their toll during his band days in Los Angeles, ‘its sprawl and selfishness causing a country boy like Watson to lose himself again’. He slowly got sober and confronted memories of childhood traumas head on. ‘Sobriety, though, was never enough. He wanted that shift to prompt change and growth, to force him into situations that were beneficial because they were uncomfortable and challenging. That, in many ways, is the motivation of these nine songs and the only album he’s ever felt deserved to bear his name.’
Watson the actor appeared as The Kid in the Coen Brothers’ film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and as a singer on the soundtrack, performing with Tim Blake Nelson on the Oscar-nominated When A Cowboy Trades His Spurs For Wings, written by his friends Welch and Rawlings. The cowboy has now traded his forefathers’ songs for his own. As his website says, we will recognise our own burdens in his wise words: All that’s left are shadows haunting you.
What We Had: Gillian Welch & David Rawlings
Few singers capture the emotion of yearning as beautifully as Gillian Welch. When she combines so intuitively with her musical and life partner David Rawlings, the effect is mesmerising. Our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com is What We Had, a moving track from their latest album Woodland.
Rawlings, whose guitar is embroidery at its most elegant, takes the vocal lead on the track but this quickly becomes a duet, the lines delivered achingly. It is sometimes difficult to differentiate between the high-register Rawlings and the more naturally gifted singer Welch, so entwined are they in the realm of plaintive musings.
What We Had is the central theme of Woodland, named after their beloved East Nashville studio which was almost demolished by the tornadoes that roared through Music City in March 2020. The couple, working frantically by failing iPhone torchlight, managed to salvage precious master tapes and musical equipment after the studio’s roof had been torn off. As if Covid wasn’t enough – ‘The beggar winds are blowing’ – hours of relentless rain presented a dire threat to their legacy.
The trauma brought a new perspective: suddenly life seemed more fragile, everything more ephemeral. Welch told Mojo: ‘That was the longest night. It’d be hard for me to describe what it felt like when the sun finally came – an absolutely fundamental, primal experience. You don’t miss your water ’til the well runs dry. There are things in life you take for granted, things in life you don’t think will be destroyed. But by the same token, there are contradictions, complications. There is a renewal, but with stories and scars. I feel like a new shoot, tender and new.’
I used to dream of something unseen
It was something that I thought I wanted so bad
But now I only want
What we had, what we had, what we had
What we had was unspoken
It flowed like wine, like music
What we had is broken now
Though we thought we could never lose it
Woodland is the pair’s first album of original songs since Welch’s The Harrow & The Harvest in 2011 and Rawlings’ Poor David’s Almanack in 2017, thus the only one so far to be attributed to both artists if you discount a lockdown collection of covers and old folk songs. Their shared billing after 30-plus years should always have been the case. They trade not only eerie harmonies but guitar lines – Welch’s quality as a picker is not to be underestimated. They used to say they were members of a ‘two-piece band called Gillian Welch’. They have never been this together.
As they sing on the album closer, voices uncannily synchronised: ‘You and me are always gonna be howdy howdy/ You and me always walk that lonesome valley.’
The addition of strings on What We Had gorgeously accentuates the melancholy and dreamy chord changes, making this album sound less spartan. There’s even an occasional rhythm section. The violins appear again on Hashtag, their stunning tribute to departed Texas troubadour Guy Clark, who championed their talents and taught them about life on the road. Producer Rawlings nods to Neil Young and Gram Parsons on What We Had; here it’s Tom Petty as much as Clark. ‘You laughed and said the news would be bad/ If I ever saw your name with a hashtag/ Singers like you and I/ Are only news when we die.’
The Bells And The Birds has echoes of CSNY’s Guinnevere, the bell-like guitar patterns flitting like birds. Welch’s lead vocal on haunting ballad North Country with Russ Pahl on hushed pedal steel, The Day the Mississippi Died (a wry apocalyptic reflection on a polarised America, featuring fiddle from Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor) and especially Here Stands A Woman is quietly spectacular. The latter, a reckoning with the ravages of time, recalls Gretchen Peters’ Arguing With Ghosts with its reference to seeing someone in the mirror you hardly recognise. Sometimes Welch can sound like the loneliest person on earth.
Like Peters, Welch and Rawlings appreciate the power of a sad song and a bleak canvas but they are still eager to leave the listener with more than a sliver of hope. Welch told The New Yorker: ‘Our narrators are never defeated. As low as they are, it’s not the end. I do believe I’m an optimist. I have profound faith in the human spirit, that people can get through the unimaginable.
‘What do I love about this job? It brings me a kinship with the world. I’m a very solitary person, and I have virtually no family. The music, and the people that hear our music, that’s probably my No1 anchor to the world.’
Empty Trainload Of Sky, the magnificent cinematic opening track and a recent Song Of The Week here, was the interim album title but the salvage operation and its raw emotional impact said it had to be called Woodland. Their studio is being lovingly restored and renovation work continues four years after the deluge.
One hundred unreleased songs were rescued. We’ve just heard 10 of them, the sound of creative lives being put back together. The cutting room floor suggests there is more treasure to follow. Aren’t we the lucky ones.
Changed Unchained: Nadia Reid
Big changes and a bigger sound. New Zealander Nadia Reid’s powerful new single Changed Unchained, our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, marks an important milestone in her life and career. It’s break-out time.
The dramatic drum-propelled track, her first for international label Chrysalis Records, signals the closing of a chapter as she revels in a fuller sound on her forthcoming fourth album, under the direction of producer Tom Healy. Says the Auckland-born, Port Chalmers-raised songwriter: ‘Changed Unchained is a great example of me bringing lyrics and a melody into the studio, then Tom and the band letting the mojo/muse/spirit do its thing in the room. That was a really freeing feeling for me. The song begun in this delicate, introspective way and formed into something quite powerful.’
The song is her first new music since 2020’s Out Of My Province, which she regards as the last of a quiet, intimate trilogy of albums (‘music that belonged to a time before everything changed’) following the acclaimed Preservation in 2017 and her debut offering Listen To Formation, Look For The Signs three years earlier. The aching title track from Preservation, with its hints of Laura Nyro and Judee Sill, is a former Song Of The Week here; Other Side Of The Wheel and Best Thing from Out Of My Province, written during a two-week refuge on the Amalfi Coast in Italy, were highly recommended.
‘This one feels like a new moment in more ways than one. There’s a freedom and an ease. Each record I’ve made I say this is me in the driver’s seat. Watch me – I’m arriving! And each time I’ve been partly wrong. Or maybe that’s just growth. You have to look at it in the rear-view mirror.’
Out Of My Province was released during the pandemic since when Reid and her husband Angus have welcomed two daughters into the world. In her homeland, restrictions were among the toughest in the world, the country’s borders closed for over two years. Reid promoted the record from her Dunedin base as best she could, putting on hold her plans to move to the UK. In July 2021, she gave birth to Elliotte; Goldie arrived earlier this year.
Life-transforming indeed. Daughter No1 appears in the video for the new single where we hear Reid moving away from her acoustic roots, exploring love and personal growth. ‘I still feel uncomfortable about the word folk and being a folk singer. It makes me sort of cringe. It’s too confining.’ She gained experience of a weightier sound when singing with the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra and a classical chamber trio; her voice remains an assured, affecting instrument, tender amid the force of synths, strings and added instrumentation. The lyrics are intriguing and intelligent.
Did we get it right? I wonder
Did I hold the light? I see it now
It wasn’t anybody’s fault
I mark the time between us in a line
Rhyme or reason, if you like
Changed by her melody or were you chained by the memory
Who’s to know?
Changed by her melody or were you chained by the memory
Who’s to know?
That pain is a faint memory I’m making
It’s ours not only for the taking
Because you walked toward me
I am transcended in your light
The singer-guitarist was inspired by a photograph, captured by phone a decade ago. It shows the singer at 22, standing in a backyard in Auckland, her face obscured by the glow of sparklers. ‘It was just a throwaway photo, but I clung to that image through the years. You have those points in life that when you look back you see were a time of almost cellular change. And that was one of those points; all my cells were changing.’ The snapshot was the obvious choice for the single’s artwork.
Her words after her last album still resonate: ‘A lot of the world can appear so sad at times but on the other hand, life is so tender and beautiful; art, music and nature become our balm. Watching people sing and dance heals me. Walking in the hills heals me. I feel privileged to be a part of that healing.’
Reid has just finished a short solo tour of the UK before heading back home with a side trip to Australia. She will return to Europe with a full band (led by her musical rock Sam Taylor on guitar) in March next year. Changed and unchained.
Comments