Songs Of The Week 2025: Take 2

Neil Morton

FEATURED SONG OF THE WEEK

Endless Tree: Valerie June

Just when you feared no relief from the daily news cycle of despair, an album’s worth of hope rushes to your aid. We’ve heard clarion calls for peace and love before but we need to keep hearing them. Tennessee roots artist Valerie June is not a lone voice but her’s is a vibrant one.

Our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com is Endless Tree, a buoyant track from the sixth album of her 25-year recording career, Owls, Omens and Oracles. Joy, Joy! is the opening song but the anthemic Endless Tree, with its uptempo gear shift and infectious chorus, is even more joyous.

Are you ready to see

A world where we could all be free?

As branches of an endless tree

May you seek and find it

Although we may not all agree

Still live together peacefully

Jackson-born June describes the album as ‘a radical statement to break scepticism, surveillance and doomscrolling, and to let yourself celebrate your aliveness. Connect, weep, change, open.’ The singer-songwriter mines the blues, gospel and soul music of her Memphis heritage, sprinkling a little psych folk into the mix.

‘I hope listeners can put themselves in these songs and discover the light inside themselves that operates at the highest vibration level. We need that right now,’ June said of an album produced by indie rock guitarist M Ward and featuring contributions from The Blind Boys of Alabama (Changed) and Norah Jones (Sweet Things Just For You).

June’s distinctive, almost child-like West Tennessee twang sings of the importance of empathy and optimism. As Paste Magazine elegantly put it: ‘If we’re all so mired in our despondency over the plunging direction the world around us is being thrust in, plainly articulating the need for love alongside advocacy for the power of joy takes on a certain rebelliousness by way of vulnerability.’ Give us idealism over cynicism any time.

The singer says of Endless Tree: ‘As we see so much divisiveness and polarisation in the world, this song asks listeners if they are ready for a more harmonious and peaceful planet. If what we focus on is what manifests, then although we don’t always agree with each other, might it still be possible to respect our differences and grow together versus creating wars? Trees have a secret language that connects them to each other. Without plants and trees, we couldn’t breathe. What can we learn from plants as teachers?’

Watching the news almost every night

Telling the stories of all that ain’t right...

Getting the courage to do something small

Lifting the spirits of all that you saw

Feeling the tiniest spark in your heart

’Cause only an ember can light up the dark

M Ward’s influence can be detected throughout from his guitar wizardry to his recruitment of fine musicians: Kaveh Rastegar on bass, Stephen Hodges on drums and fellow multi-instrumentalist Nate Wolcott, whose horn arrangements are uplifting. June and Ward had met while collaborating with soul great Mavis Staples a decade ago. The album was recorded at Pasadena’s retro-fitted 64 Sound studio, where jazz greats such as Artie Shaw worked. ‘We recorded it, analogue-style, in a wooden panelled room with all the musicians in the same space. Everything felt old and warm,’ June says.

The American singer’s pursuit of positivity and belief in human interconnection as a tool for social change is evident from the start: from Joy, Joy! to Trust The Path (‘Promise me you’ll venture towards unknown/ Every step a new discovery shown’), Calling My Spirit and Endless Tree.

Tell me, my brother, how love goes around

Neighbour to neighbour, we create a town

City to country, a nation is formed

Person to person, a kindness is born

June says her latest collection of songs ‘summon us to observe the roads we are travelling and how they might lead us through dark times. But we are never alone. There’s always an inner light to guide the way’.

That vision of the world is hard to contemplate at the moment but June’s odes to joy present an endlessly engaging alternative.

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The Last To Come Along: Hattie Whitehead

Here comes hope after the heartbreak. Hattie Whitehead’s debut album late last year charted a journey towards optimism and promise following the trauma of her mother’s death. Bloom was its pointedly cheerful title as Whitehead shared her recovery from the grieving process.

The word Bloom is referenced in one of the album’s outstanding songs, The Last To Come Along, our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, a love letter to her younger brother Sonny. This achingly beautiful track assumed greater poignancy when we saw her perform it in front of family, friends and growing fanbase as an encore at St Pancras Old Church, backed by a stirring string section. Spring was in the air and in her step.

The London-based songwriter told Songwriting magazine: ‘The message of this song, written for my brother’s birthday, is that he can be whoever he wants to be. His bloom above ground will come from the foundation of his family roots, but will develop in his own unique way. It’s about acknowledging what your past and your roots are but without letting them overshadow and dominate the new person that you are.’

The chorus is a declaration of affection and support, followed by a divine hummed refrain which the congregation at the Old Church lapped up. It resonates long in the mind:

If you are the picture I painted of you

Move through your branches and drink through your roots

What’s over the ground is a life that is new

But without the branches, the roots

There’s no bloom, there’s no bloom

There are songs about grief, political greed, female empowerment, self-acceptance and emotional survival on Bloom, which followed three EPs of increasing stature by the Richmond-born artist. ‘The overarching theme is discovering who I am. Of re-emerging from a period of intense grief and reassessing life from a new viewpoint as a changed person.’

Her capacity for empathy enables her to encourage others, including her sibling:

You tell me your head it gets darker sometimes

Meaningless matters take on a new life

I see in your eyes, through the comedy lines

The boy that’s behind has a sadness that hides from it all

From it all

The gorgeous sax solo we enjoyed in the video filmed at The Grace in London came from her jazz musician father Tim Whitehead (South Of The Border, Borderline, Loose Tubes) who plays bass clarinet on the album. Mum Linda was a music-loving poet, and Hattie’s lyrics bear the stamp. Dad was in the audience on Thursday, enjoying a special night on which his daughter shared the stage with fellow songwriters Tessa Rose Jackson and Edward Randell, excellent both. It was a heady cocktail, enriched by that uplifting string quartet and a trio of heavenly harmonies.

Whitehead earned admiration during 2023’s tour with Hejira, the magical band she fronted paying homage to the jazz-soaked mid-70s work of Joni Mitchell. Her introspective songs with courageously candid lyrics have garnered praise from Guy Garvey, with whom she collaborated on the soundtrack to the Apple TV series Trying, and BBC radio presenters Bob Harris and Craig Charles. Her sound embraces echoes of 60s and 70s folk (think Joni, James Taylor and Nick Drake), the jazz greats she was raised on and the more modern influences of Wolf Alice, Kurt Vile and Angel Olson.

The album was produced by John Reynolds, who worked with Sinead O’Connor. He contributed drums on some of the tracks. The support cast also includes stalwart collaborators such as guitarist Tom Varrall, bassist Ida Hollis and drummer Peter Adam Hill.

Bloom’s opening track Alive, an earlier Song Of The Week here along with Read My Mind, featured in her live set: ‘People so often associate being mentally healthy with being happy. For me, mental health is allowing the full spectrum of emotions that come with life. Alive is about wanting to experience all the highs and lows that life brings, and share the full picture with another person, rather than floating along in one dimension. It is about wanting to know the intricacies of a loved one’s personality, to be able to share your own, and to be loved and seen as you are without pretence. This is the true meaning of being alive.’

Her singing throughout was exquisite. Another favourite was the understated, hypnotic If You Hide. ‘This song started its life as a message to a friend, encouraging them not to hide themselves away from others. Nobody’s going to see you if you hide is the message – you won’t bloom in the way that you want to. As with many songs, these lyrics fast became a mantra to myself too.’

Note To Self: Keep writing songs as powerful and relatable as these.

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Nothing I Need: Lord Huron

As Los Angeles-based indie rock band Lord Huron prepare for the 10th anniversary tour of their breakthrough album Strange Trails, they have released a single that reminds us how much we have missed their distinctive dreamy sound. Nothing I Need is exactly what Lord Huron fans require.

Lord Huron frontman and chief songwriter Ben Schneider says of our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, a tale of lost love, what might have been and desperate hope: ‘It wonders if it’s possible – within the short time you’ve got – to ever truly know what you want, if it’s worthwhile wanting anything at all, and if there’s any point in pondering what’s down the roads you didn’t take.’ What will be will be.

I fell asleep and when I woke up I was old

I said goodbye to my youth and my blood ran cold

I got a feeling I just had to get away

I left it all behind on an endless road

But I see her face everywhere I go

I got everything I want and I got nothing that I need

In January, Schneider offered us the intriguing Who Laughs Last, featuring spoken verses by the actress Kristen Stewart, the band’s first material since their score for the 2023 movie The Starling Girl. But Nothing I Need is more like the Lord Huron we have come to cherish. Cue shimmering, resonating guitars, the swelling of synths and strings, shuffling then driving drums and Schneider’s attractively wistful vocal.

I fell in deep when you fell out of love with me

Now I got everything I want and I got nothing that I need If I believe, will you fall back in love with me?

Now I got everything I want and I got nothing that I need

Lord Huron began as a solo project in 2010, named after one of the Great Lakes near Schneider’s birthplace in Michigan. He was later joined by Mark Barry (drums), Miguel Briseño (bass/keyboards) and guitarist Tom Renaud.

The title track from their classic 2021 album Long Lost was our first Lord Huron Song Of The Week, followed by I Lied, a bewitching duet with Allison Ponthier. ‘As though Roy Orbison and Ennio Morricone had got round to collaborating,’ the blurb said of the former. Much of the album is cinematic with its sweeping sonic landscape and spaghetti western twang, ‘the perfect soundtrack for a road trip to nowhere’, as one observer put it.

A strumming hint of Spanish Harlem, a tambourine, brooding strings, then it’s The Big O meets The Big Valley. The orchestral manoeuvres bring to mind a western movie soundtrack as Schneider and company transport you to the last dance at a late 50s nostalgia night. ‘I ain’t lonely, I’m long lost.’

‘We wanted it to feel like you were coming upon a long lost classic,’ Schneider told Atwood Magazine at the time. ‘To feel like you discovered some album you somehow missed from a time period you can’t quite figure out. It’s nostalgic, and the tones and the way it’s recorded, the song structures, and some of the rhythms and melodies remind you of something, but… you can’t define it.’

Schneider, whose stylish artwork cultivated at the University of Michigan adorns the accompanying video as well as the LP cover, is the son of journalists who inspired his love of words and literature. After the astral plane of 2018’s Vide Noir, Lord Huron returned for their fourth album to the high plains and shadowlands visited on Lonesome Dreams and Strange Trails. ‘For a while I was held by the myth of the lost highway…’

Like Long Lost, Nothing I Need was recorded at their Whispering Pines Studio in LA. The anniversary celebration of Strange Trails, which featured their platinum hit The Night We Met, will be followed by a mammoth summer tour from the US to Scandinavia, Europe and the UK to promote what should be album No5. That’s something we do need.

I threw away my life on a goddamn road

But I see her face everywhere I go

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The Great Western Road: Deacon Blue

Bus driver won’t you take me

To the furthest place from here

To somewhere I’ve not been before

But maybe you have seen…

Cinematic and emblematic: that’s the title track of Deacon Blue’s 11th studio album, The Great Western Road, and our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com. An ode to their home city of Glasgow on an album commemorating 40 years of the band’s existence.

Ricky Ross, who founded the six-piece with drummer Dougie Vipond in 1985, explains: ‘Glasgow’s got these great big avenues that go out, from before the motorway was built. The Great Western Road is spectacular because it starts off in the heart of Glasgow, and then it takes you right to Loch Lomond, to the glorious wilderness.

‘I thought, that’s the metaphor I’m looking for. You’re not going to be here forever, you don’t know what’s in front of you. So there’s an element of looking back, but more importantly, there’s also an element of looking forward, and a sense of wonder and mystery. Everyone in the band liked it because everyone related to it.’

There’s an epic Bruce Hornsby quality to the album’s opening track, and for just a moment we are reminded of Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’ in the chorus before the Great Western Road takes a deft turn...

I’m waiting and watching

Cause something is coming

They say it’s arriving

No later than morning

All those lost days and wasted journeys

Undiscovered twists and turnings

Where are we now?

What’s the way out?

And the way is what we know

Though it’s late we will go

Cause it’s deep and wide and long and slow

It’s the Great Western Road

Ross adds: ‘Great Western Road leads from the city centre through the West End of Glasgow – which is a really cool and trendy part – and I always thought that for a certain time we owned that. It was the place we wanted to be and we seemed part of it for about two months in 1987. The band would meet at a bar called Chimmy Chungas and it was the gang headquarters of Deacon Blue – that’s what Great Western Road was for me.’

We hear of all the characters along the way: ‘The drivers, the travellers/ The runners, the rulers/ The prisoners, the jailers/ The lovers, the losers.’ Ross remains an eloquent story-teller and sharp lyricist.

Like 2020’s City Of Love, the album was produced by Ross and his latter-day bandmate and guitarist Gregor Philp; the songs on The Great Western Road are all written or co-written by Ross, four with Philp and one with his wife and fellow vocalist Lorraine McIntosh. The line-up is completed by original members Vipond and James Prime (keyboards) and bassist Lewis Gordon who joined in 2011.

The album’s first single, released in November, was Late ’88, which fondly recalls the care-free excitement of those early days, when they were ‘running, never stopping’. Ross told contactmusic.com: ‘I always knew that was an idea, and I wanted to have some songs that were going to sound quite big on the radio. But I also wanted to do songs that were true to me, true to us, about just being at the stage that we are in life. It’s just the next part of the adventure and it’s as exciting now as it was back in 1988.’

1988 was lift-off year for the band, largely due to the success of pop classic Real Gone Kid which appeared on their second album When The World Knows Your Name. It did from then on. ‘You can downplay it, but it did change our lives quite a bit because it just made lots of things possible. Apart from anything else, it was suddenly possible to do bigger gigs, to make the records.’ Later, Fergus Sings The Blues, Loaded, Raintown and the ageless Dignity would have a similar impact.

On The Great Western Road, Ross reaffirms his gift for creating soulful earworm melodies and ballads of grandeur: Underneath The Stars, the uplifting Ashore, his paean to the circus How We Remember It and Curve Of The Line. A particular favourite is the more upbeat People Come First, borrowed from the title of an exhibition by New York portrait artist Alice Neel they admired in San Francisco. McIntosh, whose soaring harmonies to her husband’s undimmed lead are a delight throughout, says: ‘It was so appropriate, just now at a time in the world where it seems like people do not come first in any political situation that we’re living in.’

He’s trying to run when he can’t walk

He’s trying to sing when he can’t talk

He’s trying to write when he can’t see

Cause he’s so scared of what this world might be

Deacon Blue, who are promoting their album with a short run of theatre shows at the moment and will tour the UK and Ireland in September and October, are still enjoying playing and ever grateful to the wide age range of audience they are attracting. McIntosh comments: ‘I think when you’re young, you think these possibilities are going to be there forever, and when you get to our age, you realise they’re not. Life is short, grab it while you can, and it’s not a job, it’s a privilege to make music, an absolute joy. And there are people out there spending their hard-earned cash on what we’re doing.

‘Suddenly we thought everyone was not our age in that audience any more. There are people our kids’ age because young people listen to music that their parents played them when they were growing up. We’ve had grandfathers, fathers and grandchildren at the same gigs.’ The key to their longevity? The quality of Ross’s songwriting, the ability of a married couple to work together and the chemistry of aa impressive band. ‘You can’t go out and do a great gig if you’ve not got great songs.’

McIntosh joined Deacon Blue as a session vocalist in 1987, having seen Dignity performed from her vantage point in the audience. That made her want to sing in the band more than ever. She and Ross, a former English teacher at a school near Great Western Road, were married in 1990. The end of that road for one of Britain’s most enduring and endearing ensembles is looking a long way off.

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The Gypsy Singer: Reg Meuross

When Pete Townshend was commissioning an album honouring the legacy of Woody Guthrie, he could not have chosen a more suitable songwriter than Reg Meuross to approach. Fire & Dust: A Woody Guthrie Story comprises 16 tracks, 12 of which were written by Meuross. The closing cut, our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, is The Gypsy Singer, which marks the passing of the baton between two giants of American folk music, Guthrie and Bob Dylan.

Somerset-based Meuross explains: ‘It was because of Dylan’s visits to Woody, his mimicking of his songs and singing, his hobo style, and his courage that I – and probably many more contemporary music fans – became interested in Guthrie.’

I went to see the gypsy singer lying in his bed

He was talking to the spirits, there were spirits round his head

He broke the conversation so that he could talk to me

He said ‘Sing your mighty song boy, your song will make you free’

Others came to hear his words, what words he’d left to speak

His lungs could barely hold a breath, his body frail and weak

And every story he foretold, all things had come to pass

I went to see the gypsy singer, staring through the glass

Dylan, who visited Guthrie towards the end of his life as reimagined by the movie A Complete Unknown with Scott McNairy as a stricken Woody and Timothée Chalamet as the respectful devotee, was deeply inspired by his activism and carried the torch for freedom, equality and radical action through his early music. ‘For Dylan’s first important appearance at Gerde’s Folk City in New York, he wore a suit loaned to him – Woody’s suit. That, to me, is at least symbolic of a transference,’ says Meuross.

‘I already knew some of his folk songs; in fact in my very first gig I played at least two of them. But Dylan drew my attention to the side of Woody for which he has since become famous – the compassionate, flawed and fiery fighter for freedom and equality, the protest balladeer, the Gypsy Singer.’

I went to see the gypsy singer in his Sunday shoes

He said ‘You know I ain’t crazy I just got these crazy blues’

‘None of this is real,’ he said, ‘they’re just in it for the loot

Get yourself a guitar sonny, get yourself a suit’

And so I wore the gypsy’s suit when my turn came around

And on that night the lightning flashed, I heard the thunder pound

But all the while the song of stars played gentle in my head

I went to see the gypsy singer, he whispered ‘I ain’t dead’

The album, blessed by Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter and Arlo’s sister, was produced by Townshend. ‘Reg’s terrific songs tell Woody’s life story with respect and affection, but also truth,’ he says. ‘Fire & Dust reveals a Woody Guthrie who was, above all, human. An activist, a humanitarian, tireless in his support for the working man. He was a poor parent, and a poor husband who put the causes he sang about so passionately before his duty to his own family. For me, through Reg’s brilliant songs, learning that Woody was a man with faults – just like me and most men I know – brought him to life in a new way.’

Apart from Meuross’s compositions, the album includes faithful reworkings of four Guthrie classics: So Long, It’s Been Good To Know Ya, the anthemic This Land Is Your Land and Ain’t Got No Home as well as the magnificent Deportees, Guthrie’s lyric about the 1948 California plane crash that killed 28 deported Mexican migrant workers and four American crew set to music by Martin Hoffman and recreated in full. Guthrie was angered by reports which named the crew but referred to the migrants as merely ‘Deportees’. Meuross’s attractive tenor beautifully delivers a harrowing tale:

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?

Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?

To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil

And be called by no name except deportees?

Some of the songs are written from the perspective of Guthrie’s suffering family members (listen to Mary’s Song) or inspired by his diaries and his 1943 memoir Bound For Glory. You could say, he was chiefly influenced by the 1,000 songs Guthrie is said to have composed between 1930 and 1954, before his death from Huntington’s chorea in 1967 at the age of 55.

That phrase ‘I ain’t dead’ is the title of a Meuross track in which the songwriter traces Guthrie’s sad decline in health. Our narrator provides the backstory: ‘Following the death of his fourth child Cathy Woody continued to write and seek work, although posterity would show that by 1949, at the age of 37, his best work was behind him. The man behind the legend was changing, his moods were becoming more unpredictable. His writing was explosively prolific; crazy made-up words, corrupted words, exaggerated dialect and phonetic spellings. He wrote in coloured crayon, sometimes a different colour for every word and even letter. And he signed his name – or weird variations of it – everywhere as if he were desperately trying to let everyone and himself know that he was still around.

‘In July 1952 he underwent a series of physical and psychological examinations at Brooklyn State Hospital, and in September this diagnosis was finally entered into his medical record: “Psychosis associated with organic changes in the nervous system with Huntington’s Chorea.” The family illness that took his mother, and later his two daughters had finally manifested itself in Woody too.

‘In August 1954 the Columbus Ohio Citizen reported “City Prison houses Distinguished Author, Composer & Hobo” and went on to say that Woody had been similarly ‘housed’ 12 times in the last six weeks, his only possession a book on Yogi philosophy. That same year Woody was admitted to the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey, where his New York friends and musicians from around the world would come to visit him. He wrote: The world it’s hit me in my face, it’s hit me on my head/ It beat me black and blue and green but still though I ain’t dead.’

The other standouts are Woody Guthrie’s Chains about his growing racial awareness, Fit For Work (Illegal Hands) and the poignant Red Shoes, both Meuross companion songs to Deportees, Stackabones & Runaway Boy and the title track about the fires that ravaged his life and the Oklahoma storms that ushered in his journey on the road and aboard the boxcars as the Dust Bowl Balladeer. From hobo troubadour ‘among the fallen and the failed’ to people’s hero, flaws and all.

Townshend (on bass and keyboards rather than guitar pyrotechnics) was part of Meuross’s splendid backing band with Phil Beer on slide, mandolin and fiddle, Geraint Watkins on piano and accordion, Marion Fleetwood on fiddle, Roy Dodds on percussion, Simon Edwards on bass, Bethany Porter on cello and Katie Whitehouse on backing vocals.

This is Meuross’s 16th solo album, and his third song cycle following 2018’s 12 Silk Handkerchiefs, about the Hull triple trawler tragedy of 1968, and 2023’s Stolen From God, like Fire & Dust the product of four years’ research, examining England’s role in the transatlantic slave trade during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Whenever anyone asks where have all the protest singers gone, Meuross can stand quietly proud. At 72 he is still seeking justice whenever injustice strikes. Woodrow Wilson Guthrie would be impressed by how relevant a song and its singer can remain.

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Ancient Light: I’m With Her

The joyous occasional collaboration that is I’m With Her makes you hanker for a more permanent arrangement. Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan and Sara Watkins are each known for their sparkling solo work but when they play as a trio there is even more magic in the air. Their latest single, Ancient Light, our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, is as welcome as sunshine at winter’s end.

Ancient Light will be the opening track on their long-awaited second album, Wild And Clear And Blue, scheduled for release on May 9, seven years after their celebrated debut See You Around. There have been other sporadic originals and covers, such as Crossing Muddy Waters, Send My Love (To Your New Lover), Call My Name, Wake Me When It’s Over and Espresso to maintain the flame but our craving for more has been insatiable.

This time around the sound is fuller and more ambitious, thanks in part to producer Josh Kaufman, a member of another folk supergroup Bonny Light Horseman. Jarosz says: ‘Because we’ve played together so much at this point, we have a far stronger sense of what we’re capable of creating together. We wanted to be open to anything on this record, and give ourselves more space for the solo sections to really breathe.’

Unlike the sparse intimacy of the earlier record, our first sample of elaboration reveals textures and sonic shifts that surprise and delight. The song is a tender meditation on ancestral ties and cycles of life, adorned with a wonderful instrumental break featuring Watkins’ skilful layering of fiddle and cello. ‘Ancient Light sets the tone for the entire album, communing with our past and future selves,’ say the band, ever indebted to their traditional roots.

With Jarosz on lead vocals, Ancient Light embodies a spirit of defiance as she sings of navigating the havoc around her (‘While everything’s unravelling/ I’m building a fire/ Sparks and smoke rings/ Fill up the night/ When it catches/ I’ll be swimming in the ancient light’). ‘I love that song being the first track and setting a tone of joyful melancholy,’ says Jarosz. ‘There are definitely some darker, more sombre moments throughout the record, but to me there’s something beautiful about addressing these heavier themes in a way that’s more of a celebration of life rather than a grieving of what’s been lost.’

Thinking of who came before

I hear them knock at the door

They been a long time comin’

Mmmm when I let ’em in

I feel their breath on my skin

They’ve been a long time gone

We’ll be dancing

Oh what a sight

When they get here

I’ll be swimming in the ancient light

The bridge to Ancient Light includes a reference to Mother Eagle (Sing Me Alive), another moving track that ends with a gorgeous interlacing of the trio’s voices. ‘To me those last 30 seconds of Mother Eagle are like a thesis statement for what this band is about,’ says Jarosz. ‘Our voices weaving around each other and making the song feel so full without a lot of different sounds going on – that feels so quintessentially us.’

The album was recorded at two New York studios, The Outlier Inn in the Catskills and The Clubhouse in Rhinebeck. The three women are remarkably versatile musicians: Jarosz on mandolin, octave mandolin, guitar, and banjo; O’Donovan on guitar and piano; Watkins on fiddle, cello and organ. Kaufman is the genuine polymath (nylon string guitar, tenor guitar bass, percussion, piano, organ, electric guitar on Ancient Light alone) and drummer JT Bates makes a valued contribution.

The three Americans discovered their near-telepathic chemistry during an impromptu performance at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in 2014 and soon founded I’m With Her. Over the years the multi-Grammy winners have racked up countless live shows but have been too busy making their own records to produce more trio collections. ‘I’ve been a long time coming,’ they sing on Ancient Light.

Wild And Clear And Blue will help to correct that imbalance. Such is their generosity of spirit they decided to share the writing credits on all 11 tracks. ‘When we write together it’s almost like we’re a three-headed creature – there’s never any need to take ownership of ideas, and always an ease of letting go when something isn’t working,’ says O’Donovan, of Crooked Still fame.

The wistful title track, inspired by two of their treasured musical forebears, Nanci Griffith and John Prine, was the first song written for the new album. ‘So much of this record is about connecting with your past and figuring out what you want for your future, finding yourself and finding the people you love,’ says Watkins, who has another trio, the re-formed Nickel Creek, to keep her busy. ‘It’s a journey that everybody takes, and this is our way of singing through it.’

As long as that future journey includes more trio performances – an extensive tour, which includes a London date, runs from April to November – and precious records, we’ll be with them and their heavenly harmonies.

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Looks Like The End Of The Road: Alison Krauss & Union Station

The deliciously dark Looks Like The End Of The Road looks like a new beginning for Alison Krauss & Union Station. The single, our Song Of The Week at herecomesthesong.com, will be the opening track of their forthcoming album, Arcadia, their first recorded work in 14 years.

Remember Paper Airplane? Was it really that long ago? That bewitching crystalline voice is back in harness with the dazzling dobro of Jerry Douglas on a song written by fellow Nashville resident Jeremy Lister that immediately struck a chord with the Illinois-born fiddle-playing singer.

Krauss says: ‘Usually, I find something that’s a first song, and then things fall into place. That song was Looks Like the End of the Road. It just felt so alive – and as always, I could hear the guys already playing it.’

The other guys in the bluegrass band are Ron Block (banjo and guitars), bassist Barry Bales and stellar new recruit Russell Moore on vocals, guitar and mandolin. Moore, frontman for IIIrd Tyme Out, is the International Bluegrass Music Association’s most decorated male vocalist of all time.

After releasing their last album Krauss and her Union Station cohorts took time out to build their solo careers and collaborate with other artists. Collectively, the group have more than 70 Grammy awards to their name. Looks Like The End Of The Road was the powerful song that brought them back together. Krauss’ shimmering, seemingly effortless vocal reflects on life’s joy and the losses that have scarred it.

It’s the end of the circus

And I’m feeling sad like a clown

My makeup is drowning in

Blood, sweat and tears

From my heart and I fear that

When I look around

I lost what I found

When I started off

Never thought I’d cross

The lines that were drawn

A long time ago

Are buried and gone

In lies and ego

And I drank it down

But can’t cover up

The lives that I’ve lost

I’ve run out of luck

Goodbye to the world that I know

Looks like the end of the road

Arcadia is described as a collection of ‘contemporary reflections of history’, 10 tracks that ‘transcend time, reveal beautiful and tragic truths, and reaffirm why the group remains one of the most influential, widely celebrated acts of the past four decades’.

Krauss adds: ‘The stories of the past are told in this music. It’s that whole idea of in the good old days when times were bad. There’s so much bravery and valour and loyalty and dreaming, of family and themes of human existence that were told in a certain way when our grandparents were alive. Someone asked me: ‘How do you sing these tragic tunes?’ I have to. It’s a calling. I feel privileged to be a messenger of somebody else’s story. And I want to hear what happened.’

The self-produced album, its writers including Robert Lee Castleman, Alison’s brother Viktor Krauss, Bob Lucas, JD McPherson and Sarah Siskind, arrives on March 28 before a 75-date US tour kicks off in Kentucky in April. There is a lone Alison Krauss composition, Richmond On The James, a co-write with GT Burgess. Another Lister offering, There’s A Light Up Ahead, closes the record.

Moore, who replaced Dan Tyminski, is showcased on the traditional-sounding second single, Granite Mills. Krauss says: ‘We all met when Dan left the band, and Jerry asked me, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘Russell Moore’, and they all said, ‘Absolutely!’ I couldn’t believe it when we went into the studio and his voice came through the speakers. He just stands there and sings with his hands in his pockets, and he kills it. The first song he did was Granite Mills and about 10 minutes in, Ron was covering his mouth because he started giggling. Russell came in and inspired us all.’

Bleak tales always sound beautiful in the care of Krauss and company. Welcome back.

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