On Monday the 29th of October 2012 we’ll finally be releasing Anthology Two – the much awaited follow-up to our debut release on Folkroom Records! You can find all sorts of details about it in the news section of our site, but we thought we’d take you aside for a moment to explore the more personal side of the record. Namely, the sings themselves. Over the next few days, in the lead up to the release, we’ll be looking at some of the tracks on the album and hearing from the artists themselves, who’ll give us a little insight into how they came to be.
Today we’re being a little wily – both the acts whose tracks are covered below are on Anthology Two, yes. But both acts are also playing our free Folkroom gig in London tonight. So if you want to check them out, you could do worse than coming down to The Queens Head on Acton Street from 8 tonight!
Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker  – ‘You Can Tell (By The Light)’
It’s fair to say that if I hadn’t seen Josienne and Ben play, there would be no Folkroom Records – after all, though I met him as Josienne’s shy and retiring guitarist, Ben Walker is now one half of all things Folkroom. More importantly, he’s the half that means there’s actually music to release, and not just one shabby twenty-something shouting at people about the music he likes.
It made sense for Josi and Ben to release their latest EP, ‘Homemade Heartache’, on Folkroom. They represent everything about us – modern folk and traditional folk playing around with one another like schoolyard friends. ‘You Can Tell (By The Light)’ is a new cut from the duo.
“One of my only truly positive songs,  ‘You Can Tell’ contains none of the misery I usually opt for. It’s a little love song built on a few metaphors, set to gentle lullaby-esque tune. It’s of true love waiting faithfully, for possibly years- waiting for a traveller/lover to return.  ‘John Riley’ and many other traditional folk songs are on this theme. In ‘John Riley’, the singer’s lover has been gone for seven years and some bearded guy asks to marry her one day while she’s in her garden. She turns him down, and vows to stay faithful to her husband even if he’s died or fallen in love with someone else abroad. In the end, it turns out he husband hasn’t and she doesn’t recognise that its actually him in the garden with her, because he’s grown a beard.  I guess the overall gist is “I will love you forever and one day you’ll know because everything will be telling you – the sky, birds, trees and so on… and you’ll return to me”
The rather obscure reference is to a book I was reading while I was out there, called ‘The Red Tent’ by Anita Diamant. The book was about Jacob from the Old Testament and all his wives and sons, and is told from the point of view of his only daughter, Dinah. When I wrote it I sort of imagined being any woman in the process of growing up and into a woman, talking to Dinah and looking to her as a model of womanhood and what to aspire to.”
