Description
Bella Hardys seventh solo album With The Dawn her first since being named BBC Radio 2 Folk Singer Of The Year in 2014 isnt just the latest collection of songs from this prolific and ingenious artist. The album is an account of one year of her life, good and bad, happy or sad.
With The Dawn is a more intimate and reflective album than before. Working with producer Ben Seal, the arrangements are more instinctive, more reactive, as befits the mind-set that informed the lyrics. Vivid brass gives way to lonesome piano; choral voices peal; banjos emerge out of beats and blips. Elements of the initial demos, sometimes recorded into a phone as the thoughts occurred, have been kept giving With The Dawn its striking immediacy.
These are songs written on the road, full of that sense of displacement, longing and contemplation that all itinerant musicians know. On With The Dawn, Bella Hardys soaring kite-like voice is married to lyrics that poetically question everything shes seen and done up till now; letting go of expectations, both other peoples and her own. But with closing lullaby And We Begin theres a light at the end or rather the beginning. Only one song didnt spring directly from Bellas year of touring and tumult. Jolly Good Luck To The Girl That Loves A Soldier was commissioned by Songs For The Voiceless, a project which gathered the countrys best folk artists to sing some of the lesser known stories of World War I.
Rare class and exceptional emotional depth Mojo
An aura of sophistication that will win over listeners who never set foot in a folk club The Sunday Times
A fine, no-nonsense interpreter of traditional music and an excellent songwriter The Guardian
One of the best songwriters of her generation fRoots
A natural ability to fashion catchy pop hooks in the forge of big, doom-laden folk songs Songlines
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