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One of the great things about Americana, Folk and Roots artists is their love of collaboration. Mary Chapin Carpenter may be the most high-profile name attached to this album, but this is a project of equal parts and deserves to bring the award-winning talents of Scottish songwriters Fowlis and Polwart to a wider audience.
The songs on 'Looking For The Thread' capitalise on the three songwriters' distinctive styles, but also delve into the human condition, nature and the love and experiences that tie us all together in the cosmos. The sublime opener (the first of two) is sung in Scots Gaelic. Like many of the songs on the album, the harmonies are balanced and often ethereal. The instrumentation is beautifully spacial, punctuated with traditional Scottish and Irish instruments (hardanger, whistle, Bodhrán) and stronger percussion (usually on Carpenter's songs). 'A Heart That Never Closes' exemplifies this with Carpenter's poetic and observational lyricism hitting you straight between the eyes.
“Time is just a bandit trying to steal what’s left“,
It's both poignient and brutal, but it's delivered with insouciance. Perhaps the overwhelming positivity of the track allows such dismissal. Fans of Carpenter will be only too aware of her ability to throw in a sucker-punch of a line. Another soon follows on the title track:
I made a prayer from what you said
That no one is ever dead
Because time and love remember
The stark poetry of this album doesn't let up with Polwart's 'Hold Everything' inspired by John Berger’s book Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. It's a staggeringly beautiful and poignant rumination on life and death. It's a track that takes you off guard with the lyrics that manage to be both harsh and breathtaking. Polwart's sensitive vocals act as a metaphorical hand-holder, tenderly leading the way through a cathartic track that holds a mirror up to life and death, whether you are ready to listen or not.
As I mentioned earlier, the album isn't just about the human experience. 'Rebecca' is sung from the perspective of a tree, giving grace and magnitude to a living organism that has been around for centuries. Fowlis takes a rare dip into the English Language with 'Silver In The Blue', which benefits from the ebbing and flowing of the harmonies, that are expertly placed for a song about a Scottish river, while another Carpenter track 'Satellite' tells the story of a decommissioned spacecraft doomed to burn out in the atmosphere. Here Carpenter's distinctive vocal and instruments embellish the texture of a clapped-out old bit of space-junk, with a jerking hardanger and a breathless accordion: it's all pretty magical stuff.
This isn't just an album, it's musical poetry, masterfully crafted to illustrate how we are all knitted together in the universe. It reminds us of our beauty and frailty and that we are all inexorably linked as fragments of stardust spinning through space and time. It's an album that will certainly stay with you.
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