Holiday Gift Ideas: 3 New Recordings

Music: it is part of the holidays, and part of every day.

Music is also a great gift, one which may be enjoyed alone or in company.

Winter is often a time for gift giving. I’ve ideas to help with that, which will unfold over several pieces i the upcoming days.

Some will be from artists you have met here along the Music Road, while others will be projects you will learn more about in the coming months.

They are all well worth your time, and you may find something for yourself as well as those on your gift lists. There will be a bit of seasonal music upcoming, in another story too.

To begin, here are three newer albums to get you started on your holiday gift explorations

You’ve met the Spell Songs folk here before: inspired by art form Jackie Morris and words from Robert Macfarlane in the book The Lost Words, they created a mystical, magical collection of music celebrating nature -- calling parts of the natural world that were mean to to be forgotten back to life, as it were. The artists -- JIm Molyneux, Bath Porter, Julie Fowlis, Rachel Newton, Seckou Keita, Kris Drever, and Karine Polwart -- are back with a Spell Songs II: Let the Light In. The mystery, the magic, and the great music continue.

Speaking of magic: in times when touring has been restricted or non-existent. musicians faced all kinds of challenges in keeping their lives, their creativity, and their music going. One way Sarah McQuaid decided to do this was to record live (although without an audience other than those making the recording) in a place she knows well, a historic church not far from where McQuaid lives in Cornwall. “We set her up as if it were a regular gig,” Sarah’s manager and sound engineer, Martin Stansbury told Hot Press. He and Sarah knew it would make a fine setting for a live recording, while engaging their creativity in ways both new and familiar. Indeed it does, and the result is well worth repeated listening. The album is called The Saint Buryan Sessions.

The musicians who make up the band Staran had their own recording challenges, too. They are a recently formed group, brought together by keyboard player John Lowrie. He had worked with fiddler Jack Smedley, guitarist Innes White, bass player James Lindsay, and singer Kim Carnie on other projects but the five had not played together as a five piece. With limited opportunities to gather in person, they nevertheless came up with an excellent debut album. It includes original tunes as well as song in both English and Gaelic. They decided to call it Staran after the band, whose name means path or stepping stone in Scottish Gaelic.

Stay along the music road for more gift ideas to come as this winter holiday season unfolds.

You may also enjoy
About the first Spell Songs recording
If you are considering late autumn, Thanksgiving in the US, Saint Andrew’s day in Scotland: Music for Autumn’s Landscapes at Wandering Educators offer good things to explore
Another holiday gift list from a few years back at Perceptive Travel. Music for many interests...
About the book The Lost Spells

In times when you are able to listen to much music at no cost, if you enjoy this music, I encourage you to help support the work of these artists and the cause of good, thoughtful music everywhere by purchasing their music. Direct purchase from an artist’s site is one way. Bandcamp is also a platform which supports artists’ work.

Speaking of support, if you’re in a position to do so this holiday season, your support for Music Road is most welcome. Here’s one way:

-->Your support for Music Road is welcome and needed. If you are able to chip in, here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this. Thank you.

Another way to support: you could

If you enjoy what you are reading here, check out my newsletter at Substack for more stories about music, the people who make it and the places which inspire it.

Folk with edge: Sarah McQuaid: Walking into White

Time of changing seasons, a turn of light, a lift in the air, time of telling stories...

Sarah McQuaid tells her stories through word and melody rhythm and tone and timbre. For her fourth recording, which she has called Walking Into White, she found inspiration from sources as different as the landscape of Yellowstone, the flight of jackdaws, a pattern used for ringing church bells, and stories she has been reading to her children.

The title song, a story which spins out in McQuaid’s imagination into an elegant and spare mediation on the nature of trust, began with an image of two children walking across moorland and being caught in a fog. She drew this from a story by Arthur Ransome which she came across in one of his tales, part of a series she’d been reading to her children each night at bedtime. It seemed to her, she says in her liner notes, “like a parable for life... so much so that I decided to make it the title track of this album.”

All this is framed in McQuaid’s distinctive alto and her DADGAD guitar playing. That’s a tuning which often contributes to Celtic music’s haunting aspect and one of which McQuaid is a master. Throughout the album, these elements anchor adventures both in story and in the way the music is presented.

Traveling from her base in Cornwall, England to Cornwall, New York to work for the first time with producers Adam Pierce (who is McQuaid’s cousin) and Jeremy Backofen, who had not worked in the folk genre before, McQuaid and her road manger and sound engineer Martin Stansbury created a collection which weaves in rhythms and sonic placements you might not expect from and artist known as a folk musician. All the while, though, they stayed true to the spirit and ideas of the songs while creating an album that fits in as a natural next step in McQuaid’s musical progress

On her tours supporting the album (at this writing at the beginning of October, she’s in the midst of a US run; she regularly tours internationally). McQuaid has been devoting the first half of her concerts to playing music from the album as it is sequenced, moving from Low Winter Sun, in which her guitar rings in a pattern drawn from the peal church bells to frame atmospheric and enigmatic lyrics that suggest the beginning of a journey, to a sparse and distinctive take of Ewan MacColl’s classic love song The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.

Between those two Where the Wind Decides to Blow and The Tide find McQuaid taking furtherinspiration from images in Ransome’s stories to explore ideas of uncertainty, persistence, trust, and reading signs. There’s a lot going on both lyrically and musically, though the songs themselves are rather short, at three verses with a twice repeated chorus for Where the Wind Decides to Blow and six verses for The Tide. The singer raises as many questions as she answers. The idea of walking through and with uncertainty to find trust and connection comes up again in the song Yellowstone, which was in part inspired by conversations McQuaid had with her ten year old son. All of this leaves plenty of room for listeners to explore, and material upon which to reflect.

That is true of each of the songs on Walking Into White, actually, including Sweetness and Pain, an a capella song whose three verses are spaced through the rest of the music at intervals, making a sort of recurring theme and comment which works both in word and melody. There’s also a very fine instrumental called I Am Grateful For What I Have.

Jackdaws Rising came about when McQuaid was playing music one evening with her friends Pete Coleman and Claire Hines. They got to playing an instrumental the pair had written and they suggested that if she wanted to write words to go along...

She was up to that challenge, and it went a step -- okay, several steps -- further when it came to recording the piece, which in lyric is dark and light, falling and rising. So are the percussion choices, with stamps and handclaps and rhythms which might seem out of time but actually work perfectly to express the energy of the lyric.

McQuaid’s voice is in varying ways the center of things through the recording, and that comes full circle as she draws things to a close with the hymn Canticle of the Sun and that take on The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. It’s thoughtful journey Sarah McQuaid leads on Walking Into White, one filled with interest, surprise, and challenge, as she creates music well worth repeated listening.

You may also wish to see
Buildings, songs, England: Sarah McQuaid at Perceptive Travel
Ireland's Music: Cara Dillon: A Thousand Hearts
Cathie Ryan: Through Wind and Rain

Photograph of Sarah McQuaid by Phil Nicholl

-->Your support for Music Road is welcome and needed. If you are able to chip in, here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this. Thank you.

Songs & landscapes: Sarah McQuaid

Sarah McQuaid brings a confluence of landscapes to creating her music: she was born in Spain, grew up in Chicago, lived for some years in Ireland, and is now based in Cornwall in the southwest of England. She spends about six months of each year traveling the world with her music. McQuaid’s most recent recording, The Plum Tree And The Rose, finds her exploring ideas of changes, through stories which arise from history and from her own travels.

McQuaid is also a parent. The song she sings in this video comes from that place, as well.







Recently, I had the chance to write about The Plum Tree And The Rose at some length for A Traveler's Library and Perceptive Travel. In these two (different) stories you will find out about how a Renaissance hall and a cathedral inspired McQuaid to write two of the songs on the album. You’ll also learn about a really fine song called In Gratitude I Sing, which was inspired by McQuaid's remembering the American holiday while far from North American shores.

McQuaid will be playing a number of concerts and also giving workshops on DADGAD guitar in the United States during September and October. Here is McQuaid's tour schedule.


you may also wish to see
from Scotland: The Boy and the Bunnet
Music for a midsummer's day
late summer: two for the road

-->If you'd like to support my creative work at Music Road,
here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this.Thank you.