The Arts Desk

10 Questions for folk singer-songwriter Olivia Chaney – ‘deeply personal songs that open out to the universal’

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The British folk artist and singer songwriter Olivia Chaney released her third solo album this week, as we break out into springtime, and she’ll be touring sporadically around the UK over the next few months, with a showcase at London’s Union Chapel in June.

The British folk artist and singer songwriter Olivia Chaney released her third solo album this week, as we break out into springtime, and she’ll be touring sporadically around the UK over the next few months, with a showcase at London’s Union Chapel in June.

Chaney is a singular singer and songwriter with a beautiful voice and the instrumental finesse honed at the Royal Academy of Music and Aldeburgh. She released her first EP in 2010 and 2013, the year she was nominated twice, for the Horizon Award and Best Original Song, at the BBC Folk Awards (and again for Folk Singer of the Year in 2019).

Her debut album, 2015’s The Longest River encompassed Henry Purcell, her own striking originals, and traditional songs such as “The False Bride”. Her collaboration with Portland indie rockers The Decemberists as Offa Rex resulted in 2017’s Grammy-nominated Queen of Hearts set of traditional songs, encompassing the cautionary tale of “Flash Company”, intimations of mortality in “The Old Churchyard” and a superbly delicate “Willie O Winsbury” sung by a voice that could have been spun from silver.

Thomas Bartlett, the genius-level pianist, producer and member of Irish-American supergroup The Gloaming, produced her second solo set, 2018’s Shelter, with its quietly minimal arrangements on piano and guitar. Chaney and Bartlett also worked together on last year’s short set of French chanson, from the medieval ballad to Sixties pop classics. They were, she tells me, recorded over a couple of days in Chic’s old studios in New York, with Sam Amidon adding his haunting violin parts.

Now Chaney and Bartlett, again with Sam Amidon guesting, alongside a string section of Rakhi Singh and Jordan Hunt, and extra production work from Vessel, Dave Okumu and Olivia Coates, are behind Circus of Desire. Much has changed in her life since Shelter. She’s moved from London to Yorkshire, got married, is the mother of two children, and here in conversation as she prepares to release Circus of Desire, she proves to be probing, questing, revealing, and expansive in her approaches to music, to life and love and the circus of desire that comes to all out towns.

Tim Cumming: Tell us about working with Thomas Bartlett again

Olivia Chaney: We’d made Shelter together, and I knew I’d do this new record with him, but Covid changed the world for all of us, and mostly for the worst. I had a child during that, and then I managed to get to New York and make the record and then got back. Then I had another kid [laughs]. So a lot’s happened. I’d left London and fell in love with someone who lived in Yorkshire. And all of that fed in to the writing.

I’m not prolific but I am a writer who draws on catharsis. They’re songs drawn from experience, but there’s also an element where I try to get more universal, and the writing becomes less naval-gazing as I hopefully mature as a person.

Tell us about the album title, and title track

“Circus of Desire” has lyrics I sketched a long time ago, at the same time as another song on the album, “Bogeyman”. Sometimes you’ll sketch all kinds of things and quite consciously park an idea. Unconsciously something in you isn’t ready or knows that it needs to percolate, but it’s always there. There are so many different ideas and it’s amazing how our memories manage to hold all this stuff, because I always knew both those songs I wanted to turn into something.

Hopefully on this record there are deeply personal songs that open out to the universal. I wrote those lyrics at a very different time of my life, which was miserable and anxious. As it was when I wrote “Bogeyman”. My life has really evolved and stabilised and opened out and I’ve become a mother, and you come back to those words and they take on a different meaning for you. That’s been a beautiful part of the process of making this record.

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Review: Sandra Kerr & John Faulkner – “The Music From Bagpuss”

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Recommended restorative listening from the children’s TV classic, review by Barney Harsent

In 1974, a saggy old cloth cat and his rag-tag bunch of friends managed, in just 13 episodes, to influence a generation. Ask pretty much anyone who watched Bagpuss what their first experience of traditional folk music was and the answer is unlikely to be Fairport Convention or Steeleye Span. The music of Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner, multi-instrumentalists with links to Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and the London Critics Group, earwormed its way into a nation’s consciousness via a cloth cat, a rag doll, a carved wooden bookend in the shape of a woodpecker and colony of mice who were more likely to yarn bomb your sitting room than shit in your cornflakes.

The Music From Bagpuss is nothing if not exhaustive, bringing together all of the songs featured in the series, plus outtakes and alternate versions. A mixture of traditional pieces, original compositions and improvisations – often in the space of just one song – it is a Proustian journey back to childhood and a bone fide bucolic folk-roots classic.

The album is littered with sophisticated playing, intricate instrumentation and playful phrasing, but above all is the sheer strength of the songs. Whether it’s renosing traditional folk standards, as Kerr and Faulkner did for “The Weaving Song” and “Uncle Feedle” (adapted from “The Tailor and the Mouse”) or inspired original compositions such as the “The Miller’s Song”, one can’t help feeling that, these days, such care, craft and experimental bravery simply wouldn’t feature on music created for a children’s television show. It’s  certainly absent from 90% of the Mercury short list.

Of course, there’s nostalgia at play, but that isn’t incidental – it is this music’s strength. A yearning for something lost to childhood is, I suspect, universal. There are times when we can all feel a bit tired, a bit saggy and loose at the seams. It’s getting old. The music that Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner wrote for the 13 episodes of this wonderful series manages to find that part of us, bind it, stick it with glue glue glue, and leave us feeling like new again. Recommended restorative listening.

The Arts Desk