Amy Hollinrake – Sad Lady Songs Vol.1 EP (2023)

Previously featured on Folk Radio, Amy Hollinrake is a London-based alt-folk singer-songwriter whose work often draws on women’s stories within folklore and mythology and fuses them with a contemporary sound; Sad Lady Songs Vol 1 is her second EP.

Opening with her signature Appalachian dulcimer on Dulcimer Song (To Know Her), the airy rippling melody belying the lyrics about women feeling pressured to conform to expectations and stereotypes (“To be is to be/To see is to want to be seen…Was she at the mercy of men…Or created by them?”) as she notes “Who am I to judge as a woman/Created in the same skin” and “To know her is to hope for her/And all those who follow her/Into this aching of a pit/The pit you sunk into”.

Reading through folk songs and ballads, she was struck with how many are about women drowning, including the five-minute Blackwaterside with its opening drone and slow, steady percussive rhythm and echoes of Sandy Denny. It’s a theme she picks up on her own It Draw’s The Same, the atmospherics woven with the help of Evie Hilyer-Ziegler on violins and banjo and Ben Smith’s keys, an ode to Millais’ painting of Ophelia and a critique of how women are so often depicted as victims in the folk tradition where suicide seems to be an attractive option (“I saw her floating/In the same spot, where I jumped in/Or was I pulled in?… Her lines blur with the oily surface/Is time just longing to take her back/I wish that I could smudge my edges/Just like that”).

Further reflecting the title’s theme, on the steady walking rhythm of Milk Jug with her distant silvery vocals and shimmering yet somehow discordant dulcimer, on which she retells the old folk tale of The Yorkshire Boggart, a mischievous creature which, in the original wrecks the produce of a Yorkshire dairy farmer, souring and curdling the milk, here recast as a personal trauma break-up allegory, the boggart forever following you around until you learn to accept or even embrace the pain (“Dwelling in the wound you left, for some kind of comfort./It feels like milk churning around my chest… I learned to love the bad taste”).

Opening faintly as the keyboards tinkle their way in like dawn coming up, the final number is the ethereal pastoral Swallow’s Tune, a paradoxical closing note of both rebirth in the spring and being trapped in the constant cycle it represents, the track slowly and softly fading way into the skies.

One to let simmer rather than provide an immediate rush, Sad Lady Songs is further evidence of Amy Hollinrake’s burgeoning craft and growing reputation on the contemporary folk circuit. The promised Vol. 2 is eagerly anticipated.