Sunday Sessions: A song about hanging in through hard times

In Scotland along the coast you can find a plant called sea pink. It is also known as thrift.

photo by Ekaterina from Pixabay

Thrift is a hardy plant, hanging on in rough landscapes and through the ever changing weather of Scotland’s coasts,

Karine Polwart loves those coastal places near her home in Scotland. Thinking about the resilience of these plants got her thinking of song ideas.

Karine often finds inspiration in the natural world. That is especially part of her work with the Spell Songs collective, a group of seven musicians who came together over the book The Lost Words.

You’ll find two ways to explore Karine’s song Thrift below. One was created during the recording of the song.

The other, as you will hear, came about when the musicians arrived to play a concert while on tour only to find there had been storm damage to the venue making it unsafe to go ahead with the evening.They made this presentation of the song to share online with the audience who could not be there.

The book The Lost Words began when artist Jackie Morris learned that a number of words, most to do with nature, were to be dropped from a popular children’s dictionary in the UK.

Jackie had the idea to create a book with illustrations of these words. She contacted nature writer Robert Macfarlane to see if he’d write a forward for such a book.

He came back with a different idea: what if he wrote poems, spells of a sort, to go along with her art, both working to call aspects of the natural world back into awareness?

Their collaboration led to the book The Lost Words.

Presenters at the Folk by the Oak Festival heard music in the art and the words.

They arranged for seven musicians they knew had interest in the natural world to get together to create songs.

There’s a good bit more to the story, which had thus far resulted in another book, three albums of music, concerts, educational resources, and more.

Each of the Spell Songs musicians has a thriving solo career apart from that project.

You met a song from one of Karine’s recent projects in an another Sunday Sessions story called Travel These Ways.

A different project she has been working on has led Karine to create a Substack, too. It’s called Pockets of Wind Resistance.

The other Spells Songs artists are Julie Fowlis, Jim Molyneux, Beth Porter, Seckou Keita, Rachel Newton, and Kris Drever. You’ve met Kris’s work before in this Sunday Sessions piece, and Julie’s here and here.

More about Spell Songs

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