A classical figure, misted as if the camera had caught something emanating from a pre-Raphaelite otherworld. Compare, perhaps, with a photograph of the bisexual American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay: the same classic-Hollywood poise, the same melancholy aura. She seems, though, to resist this framing as ethereal siren. She’s nothing if not real.
Caroline Weeks’ debut, Songs For Edna – its lyrics transposed from Millay’s exquisite, haunting poetry – has the feel of a record from a time-slip, an unplaceable artefact. The atmosphere of records by the likes of Karen Dalton, Linda Perhacs (Weeks is a fan of both), or Judee Sill, pervades: at once otherworldly and unerringly close, as if “the listener will… feel like I am singing in the same room as them”, cutting surgically to the heart of life. Her unaffected, direct vocal belies the strangeness of the act: over skeletal fingerpicking she reconstitutes the voice of a woman nearly 60 years dead – beautifully. “I was looking through a dusty old book of American poetry and I came across the sonnet ‘I Shall Go Back’, as I read out loud – the words danced off the page into song. Edna's poems struck a chord, deeply resonating with me on a very personal level”. It’s precisely that sense of uncanniness – the revenant past’s ability to shake us to the core – that Songs For Edna captures.
Weeks is very familiar with this sense of connection to the bygone. Her own musical background goes back some generations. “My great-grandad played in a brass-band where every musician was a member of the Weeks family… My grandma Gladys Weeks, who has sadly passed away now, had the most incredible voice, a very high-pitched warble. At a young age, sitting on my grandad's knee I would be mesmerised. I realised then that singing was something special.” Her childhood home was full of music: “my Dad would sing in choirs and listen to Leonard Cohen, my Mum sings around the house non-stop – mostly Carpenters and Joni Mitchell songs. I was always encouraged to sing, to sing from my heart, to sing for pleasure, in quite a spiritual way."
At the heart of folk-song is a dialectic between the experience of the singer, and the singer’s possession by the song. In this, poetry, with its penetrating focus on language, proves the perfect source. “There is a blank sound-canvas, I can colour the words, playing around with the rhythm, harmony and tone… the poems feel their way into music.” Millay is a marginal figure even within histories of American poetry, and the obscurity of source was part of the attraction: “The fact that she is fairly unknown makes her more attractive, or special in some way, like being let in on a secret.” This performative intimacy comes over in her live performances, which often includes “dance, choral pieces… tape recorders hidden under chairs and behind curtains.”
Solo recording is only one branch of the work she has been involved in around her hometown of Brighton, stretching from membership of the live incarnation of Bat For Lashes to “an all-female Bulgarian choir”. Her ex-membership of the experimental folk group Hamilton Yarns perhaps offers a background to her own aesthetic – a kind of futuristic archaism, appropriate to a landscape containing both the modernist incubator of Bexhill and the South Downs’ ancient beauty. “I feel that there are so many beautiful words in the world that have been lost and forgotten…there needs to be a renaissance, a revival of the past. I think we human beings need to slow down and appreciate what has come before us."
Begin here.
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