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Eve Goodman – 2024 – Summer Sun, Winter Trees

Folk, traditional, story-teller.

Ze maakt bijzonder mooie muziek en vertelt er verhalen bij. Prachtig accent om naar te luisteren. Iets anders dan je gewend bent, misschien. Zij mag zeker blijven in huize Mac.

A native of North Wales, Goodman writes and performs in both Welsh and English and was recently a guest artist on Bryn Terfel’s Sea Songs album. Following on from her 2021 Wave Upon Wave EP, influenced by the likes of Drake and Mitchell, Summer Sun, Winter Trees, produced by Luke Evans, who also contributes an array of instruments, Kashmiri santoor among then, marks her album debut, a meditation on the loss of her father to suicide in 2017 and a journey to find meaning again, initially written as a personal catharsis but now holding out a hand to those also in need of healing.

As you’d imagine, it’s an often melancholic, reflective affair, the music delicate and vulnerable in its emotions, the eight-minute title track and its circling fingerpicked guitar opening proceedings with its contrasting images of light and dark using the change in seasons as a metaphor for loss (“now the light is low and you’ll never know/You’re not here but I feel your glow… Since you left for a different day/When the moon shows up you’re far away/And I scream to her, I punch and fight/Surely she reflects your light”) and the swings between  love and grief and how they become one, pointedly personal as she sings “I’m not ready to say this/Father, why did you do this?… Your sun was low and so you go/I love you more than you could know/You are my winter sun”.

In similar spare and circular musical fashion, her influences evident, the breathily sung pastoral folk of the introspective stream of consciousness ‘Burn’ (“A sense of guilt/Like a twisting spiral stair/Curling round on itself…Things I’ll never learn/Things that make me burn/And the flames will turn /In on themselves/Consume themselves”), with everything you knew changing, but finding  liberation amid the tragedy, again alluding to her father’s suicide in “And you circled around before diving/Like a beautiful bird of prey/Locked on the notion of dying”.

Avian imagery takes wing too on the fingerpicked questioning ‘Why?’ (“Follow the white wings of the dove/The wings of your mother/Carrying you home…Your beauty catches me/Like a baby bird/Before it’s taken flight”), the mood becoming more despondent with the resonantly titled ‘That Day’ (“Yes, there are days when I think of joining you/Not in that way, not from that place/One of those days when I’m old and grey/On my final day will you give it all away?”) and her continuing search for answers and peace of mind (“I wanna hear you say, you’re okay/Since you rode away that day/And took your like away/Didn’t think you’d make me pay/It would kill you once more/To think you’d made me pay/In any way”) and the constant reminders of loss mingled with a bittersweet relief (“Here, I’m still here, always listening for you/I see you in the birds and you come out in my words/Wherever you are I know your mind is not at war/The language of pain does not live behind your door”), the song ending with the anguished “What’s this life about?/You created me and now you’ve gone away”.

The sole track sung in Welsh, ‘Pellter’, which translates as distance, is an intimate reflection on loving someone who is struggling with their mental health and cannot love themselves but finding it hard to fathom (“My father is lost in the night/And a candle burns in the corner/I hear him speak another language/I listen but I cannot understand”).

Returning to bird imagery, the gently circling guitar melody of ‘Jay Feather’ speaks to seeking tokens and triggers of remembrance (“I made it my intention to find a piece of you/

Resting on the ground on the forest floor /In the shape of a jay feather”) and of the pantheistic healing power of nature (“When I walk alone you are the ground beneath my feet/You’re the canopy and the fallen tree/The sound of the woodpecker…I like to watch the creatures, to see them carry on/Through the winter days and the low sun/I hope they keep you busy”).

Learning to live with grief  (“You’re a star and a far off light/Since you left us here it gets cold at night”) and the ambivalence of survivor guilt (“Oh brother, we’re alive/Oh mother, we survived”), is the touchstone of the slow walking ‘Alive’ (“Here is what I know/Hide from it, it will only show/Push it down don’t let it grow/Go to sleep and wait for it to go… This is how I have chosen to live/My feet are moving slow/And my mind is going to where I need to go”). That final introduction of positivity flows into the autoharp colours of  the self-explanatory ‘Pick Up The Pieces’ (“Pick up all the pieces of the life that you let go/Here it comes and here it goes/I’m getting good at letting go”), the album ending, Ben Ford on bodhran, with ‘Quiet Revolution’ and, while never forgetting, the resolution to face the future rather than be chained to the past and letting your voice be heard (“Come gather in the field now/Come leave it all behind/Come lower down your shield now… We block out distant sirens/Singing to our bones …we’ve been hiding, fighting/Dying and trying for too long…We’re under the same sky now/But we’re seeing different stars/Inventing constellations/Naming what is ours…we are singing but we sing a different song”).

An emotionally raw and often heartbreakingly painful album, the purity of O’Connor’s voice and the quiet serenity of the melodies affording the balm to make it through, you don’t so much listen to it as absorb by osmosis.

Tracks:
01. Summer Sun, Winter Trees
02. Burn
03. Why
04. That Day
05. Pellter
06. Jay Feather
07. Alive
08. Pick Up All the Pieces
09. Quiet Revolution
10. Summer Sun, Winter Trees (Radio Edit)
cover


Staat er compleet op, 10% pars mee gepost. Met zeer veel dank aan de originele poster. Laat af en toe eens weten wat je van het album vindt. Altijd leuk, de mening van anderen. Oh ja, MP3 doe ik niet aan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFlZAuP7dGw