Letter 18 - Literary Singer-Songwriters
Hi,
When listening to a song for the fist time, I generally don’t fully process its lyrics as words. I only really hear melody and beats, and the vocals form part of that as an instrument, rather than communicating a tangible message. I often can’t quite get my head around what’s actually actually being sang about until I can read the lyrics written down, to the extent I may know every word of a song but not how they actually fit into a coherent sentence.
This can be quite frustrating as someone who listens to music all day every day, but there are some notable exceptions. Unfortunately songs with terrible lyrics tend to jump straight out at me, but thankfully on the other hand I can appreciate hip-hop verses pretty quickly. The third kind of loose category I can appreciate the lyrics of on first listen is folk music (or some derivative of it) that’s so well written it’s almost poetical in nature, or that possesses a rich storytelling quality - songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon or Bob Dylan.
It’s somewhat rare that I find records that do speak to me in this way, so it’s been a real boon that I’ve come across 3 albums released in the past 4 months that do, so I’ve written this letter to share them with you.
As always, I have curated playlists you can listen to while you read - Apple Music - Spotify.
If you missed any of my previous letters, or want to find some other music or films, you can find them in The Odhracle Archive.
Please like & subscribe, share with anyone who would enjoy, and let me know what you think of any of the recommendations in the comments below.
Much love, Odhrán x
A Misleading Title, Happy Girl Indie & Daytime TV
I’ve linked to each record’s Bandcamp below where available, and you can listen to a playlist of the songs I’ve discussed in this Letter on Apple Music and Spotify.
Cameron Winter - Heavy Metal (2024)
Genre(s): Alternative rock & alternative folk.
For fans of: mid-to-late ‘60s Bob Dylan, MJ Lenderman & Father John Misty.
Songs to try: Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed), Love Takes Miles & The Rolling Stones.
Released on Partisan Records in early December 2024, Heavy Metal is the solo debut of 22 year-old Cameron Winter, who is better known as front-man of genre-bending Brooklyn rock band Geese. It’s unconventional for the front-man of a critically successful band to release prominent solo work this early in their career, but Winter is far from a conventionalist. Although I did listen to this record when it came out, I didn’t spend enough time with it for it to make it into my 2024 Album of the Year list, but looking back on it now I reckon it would be very near the top of it.
Both literally and thematically, Heavy Metal is a coming-of-age record tackling existentialism, nihilism, love, faith and the strains of creative pursuits. Winter’s lyrically dense album is laden with intentionally obtuse metaphors and grandiose verbiage. He cites inspiration from lofty places - in the lyrical genius of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, and in (what he described in a Line of Best Fit profile as “pretentious stuff”), the writings of 19th Century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, Walt Whitman, James Joyce and American beat poets like Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac.
The influence of the beat poets is apparent in the often abstract nature of his lyricism - and the album is definitely in the lineage of Dylan & Cohen, and other melancholy songwriters like Tom Waits, Lou Reed and Nick Cave. Still, it’s a high-stakes game referring to so many greats when promoting your debut album, but Winter has the makings of a fearless young star. When asked in a recent Reddit AMA how his band Geese ended up supporting King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard on their recent tour, Winter revealed he simply “Dm'd them a picture of their US tour poster with "+Geese" added in comic sans. They left us on read and I thought "fuck I've ruined our chances," we got an email two weeks later that they'd have us on the tour.”
He’s not just been influenced by Dylan’s music, but also his crafting of his public persona. In the same way Dylan obfuscated his backstory and contributed to his own mythology, Winter is often illusive and fantastical. His artist page on his booking agents website claims, in a paragraph titled “About Cameron Winter”, another titled “More about Cameron Winter” and then seven others titled “Even more about Cameron Winter”, that he “spent the halcyon days of his youth listening to a steady stream of top 40 radio as he worked long hours as a signmaker's apprentice”. It also claims the album was recorded in “amphetamine-fueled” recording sessions in hotel closets using his built-in MacBook microphone, but also in various “Guitar Centres across the New York tri-state area”. He also claims it features guest musicians sourced from Craigslist in the form of “a five-year-old bassist” or a “Boston steel worker-cum-cellist”. Even the title of the album plays a trick on the listener, with its music being nothing like the titular genre.
He later told Line of Best Fit something closer to the truth - that it was written and recorded in a tiny upstate New York house rented by his producer Loren Humphry (who has produced for Lana Del Rey, toured with Tame Impala and Florence & the Machine, and recorded with Arctic Monkeys). Winter says he would “start every morning going out on the front lawn and listen to fuckin’ Belle and Sebastian or the Leonard Cohen song ‘Teachers’ like a thousand times and kick myself that I would never write anything that good. And then I’d go inside, brew coffee, and try to get the thing done”.
When asked about the creative challenge of the solo project Winter told Line of Best Fit “Having to do all the fuckin’ work myself is a big one,” Winter sighs. “Having to play all the goddamn instruments myself. I mean, I was also going through what I now recognise as a major depressive episode during the main tracking of it, and that sucked. It all sort of coalesced with me having to do a lot of the stuff myself, and I would have this song where I had to just sit there and for every six-minute performance track the whole fucking shaker thing myself, or the xylophone I insisted on adding. In between takes, I’d just lie down and put my head between couch cushions.”
I only learned that he’d performed it all himself after I’d listened to the album about 30 times. This blew my mind given the vast array of instruments on this record - Cancer of the Skull alone has piano, guitar, a jaw harp, a mandolin, a flute and a clarinet. That song is also a testament to the cleverness of his songwriting - it’s so demanding musically whilst being itself a metaphor for the demands of the creative process - “Oh, cancer of the fingers // And the hands of a beginner // Songs are meant for bad singers … Oh, songs are a hundred ugly babies // I can’t feed.”
This theme is also present on the opening track The Rolling Stones in line “Until my miracle drugs write the miracle song” - a reference to the antidepressants he discusses taking during the album’s recording. This song has two of the most outrageous lyrics on the album - “Like Brian Jones // I was born to swim towards a month ago // Towards the Rolling Stones // Towards me and you” - a reference to the Rolling Stones founder who drowned in his swimming pool at age 27, and “Like Hinckley’s son // I was born to dance with a candy gun // Towards the president’s ass // towards me and you”, a reference to John Hinckley Jr., a failed musician who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan with a small cheap gun. I think the “you” Winter is singing about here is the concept of creative fulfilment and success, and the allusions to Jones’ death and Hinckley Jr’s failed assassination attempt, are tied to Winter’s self-sabotaging tendencies in his own creative pursuit.
His literary interests are evident on one of my favourite songs on the album Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed) - Nausicaä is a character in Homer’s Odyssey who helps Odysseus after he is shipwrecked, and is the object of Homer’s unrequited love. It’s a blues-rock song with a hook which exemplifies how Winter uses falsetto to individually play the role of a choir, rather than featuring guest vocalists. His vocal range is the standout aspect of the album really. He communicates such great emotion and storytelling through key and pitch changes on almost every song. You can really hear this on Drinking Age, a song about his relationship with alcohol, despite it only being about 60 words long.
Musically, one of the most impressive tracks on the album is Nina + Field of Cops, which unrelentingly teeters at the edge of crescendo in frantic piano, jazz drumming and horns for its entire near-6 minute run time. Outside of the powerful line “I’ll love whatever kicks me hardest in the mouth”, I’m not entirely clear what Winter’s communicating through the lyrics on this one. However the titular Nina returns on subsequent track $0, the album’s only single. $0 also calls back to the zero dollar man lyric in Cancer of the Skull (or the latter calls back to $0, given it was released as a single first - it’s hard to keep track with Winter…). I think this “zero dollar man” metaphor is one not of feeling worthless as you might think on first listen, but that Nina makes him feel free (in the sense that something which costs zero dollars is free, not worthless) - “You’re making me feel like a dollar in your hand // you’re making me feel like I’m zero dollar man.”
The most talked about lyrics on the album come at the end of $0, where Winter proclaims “God is real, God is real // I’m not kidding, God is actually real // I’m not kidding this time … God is real, I wouldn’t joke about this”, with some critics interpreting this as Winter sincerely expressing his faith. However, given how much of the album and his press engagement around it consists of smoke and mirrors, half-truths and misdirection, and as the music video features Winter exclaiming the lines on a corner surrounded by pigeons, like some sort of street preacher, I strongly land on the side that it’s another form of misdirection, and perhaps the God that he has found is in whatever or whoever Nina represents.
I’d already arrived at this conclusion by the time I read that Line of Best Fit interview, where Winter helpfully hammers it home for me - “listening to today’s singer-songwriters, and they just grossed me out when I would compare them to Leonard Cohen especially because I would listen to his stuff and barely had any idea what he was talking about, but I felt it in my bones. In terms of expression, neither one of them, to my knowledge, had ever sat down and been like, ‘I’m going to express how I feel happy, or sad, or horny, or sleepy’ – it was always a slice of their whole lives. Almost like a painting.”
If you liked this, listen to Leonard Cohen’s debut album Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967), one of the greatest folk albums of all time, and one that Winter listened to frequently when recording this record, and the surrealist lyricism of Bob Dylan’s revolutionary Highway 61 Revisited (1965).
Anna B Savage - You & i are Earth (2025)
Genre(s): Indie-folk & alternative folk.
For fans of: Haley Heynderickx, Joni Mitchell & Adrianne Lenker.
Songs to try: Donegal, I Reach For You In My Sleep & Agnes.
Before releasing her debut EP in 2015, Londoner Anna B. Savage completed a master’s degree in poetry. Her debut was well received and she got some industry hype, but she suffered severe self-confidence issues, and largely left music and the music industry behind for a number of years. She later moved from London to Dublin to study at the BIMM Music Institute, and there released her debut album A Common Turn (2021), a deeply personal telling of her journey to self-acceptance.
She’s since moved to County Donegal, and You and i Are Earth, her third LP, is a love letter to her new home on the Irish coast, and to her Irish partner, in equal measure. One of my favourite songwriting skills is the ability to convey a sense of place or time - for a song to transport you somewhere via a feeling communicated in its music. On this record Savage sweeps the listener up into the comforting embrace of her portrayal of her new home. Her joy and love radiates from each song, with the struggles from her earlier life washed away by the cold waters of the North Atlantic.
As an English woman, she doesn’t achieve this effect through cheap tricks - there’s no Clannad covers or “Plastic Paddy” about the album - it’s the warmth of her lyricism, the soft tone of her singing and underlying instrumentals that reflect someone truly understanding what is so special about that particular corner of the world. She even snagged the support of Irish alternative producer du-jour John “Spud” Murphy (Lankum, ØXN, Ye Vagabonds & Black Midi), lending real pedigree to the album.
She weaves various tributes to her new home throughout the album, but puts it front and foremost on third track Donegal, which opens abruptly with the lyrics “The day I arrived, I dove into the sea // And pleaded, “Donegal, please look after me”. Savage recounts her mother pleading “Whatever you do, don’t fall in love // Please come back to me”, to which Anna responds “Well, I’m sorry Mum, I’ve gone and done it // The moss and the views and that lovely man, too.” There’s something so intrinsically coastal Donegal to the musicality of the song, with the timbre of her voice repeatedly pushing against the instrumentals like the tide splashing against the rugged coastline.
I Reach for You in My Sleep, is a love song with such intimacy that it almost feels like we shouldn’t be hearing it, that it’s too personal an experience. It beautifully conveys the early love in her relationship “You reach for me in your sleep // That’s new to you, you tell me // I awake / My head turns to face you // Take your breath in mine // You were reaching for me too // I awake // And find you wrapped around me // Safe, our limbs entwined // You were reaching for me too”. Anna’s stunning singing shines through on this track.
She paints a similar intimate portrait on Mo Cheol Thú in a plain-speaking storytelling approach. She recounts her partner learning Irish as he wasn’t taught it in the North (Irish language is not a mandatory topic in Northern Ireland as it is in the Irish republic), and telling her “Did you know that there’s no direct way // to translate to Irish “I love you” // Just “Mo Cheol Thú””, which literally translates to “You are my music”. In an interview on The Point of Everything podcast, Savage suggested both Ireland and her partner can be interchanged as the object of her affections throughout the album, which adds another layer of complexity to these love songs.
Something I’ve always enjoyed about Savage is that she, like Haley Heynderickx and Iron & Wine, is one of these folk musicians who feel inseparable from the natural world. Like they were not so much born into it but wandered out of an ancient forest with twigs in their hair. I particularly adored the coastal setting of Mullaghmore she chose for her Covid-enforced Tiny Desk (Home) Concert.
She doesn’t stick to those nature-adjacent tones on the entirety of her last album, inFLUX (2023), which features more electronic production, but she’s fully embraced more earthy textures both in this album’s mostly analogue production and its aesthetics, with the music videos featuring calming shots of streams, the ocean leaves and moss. She goes even further on the music video for Agnes, which features Savage covered with moss, soil and ferns, literally becoming one with nature. Agnes is a brilliant display of intricate songwriting skill, describing interactions between a protagonist and a Selkie (or a similar but undefined mythological creature), with Irish folk artist Anna Mieke lending her voice as the latter.
It’s rare that an album so unwaveringly joyous achieves what it sets out to with such precision. In interviews Anna has explained how she sees writing poems and writing lyrics as two very different activities, and I’ll defer to her expertise in respect of the processes, but to me her lyricism on this album is nothing short of poetry.
If you like this, listen to Haley Heynderickx’s two albums I Need to Start a Garden (2018) & Seed of a Seed (2024), who’s another earthy indie-folk singer-songwriter who has a similar guitar playing style to Savage. I wrote about the latter record in Letter 3.
Richard Dawson - End of the Middle (2025)
Genre(s): Indie-folk & alternative folk.
For fans of: Mount Eerie, Daniel Johnston & Elliott Smith.
Songs to try: Gondola, The question & More than real.
Richard Dawson is a unique voice in the contemporary folk scene. The Geordie singer-songwriter takes traditional folk conventions and flips them with his unusual storytelling style and eclectic taste. He cites influences from as broad a spectrum as to contain Japanese post-minimalist contemporary classical music, devotional music of Islamic Sufis, and the storytelling styles of legendary Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu, MF DOOM and comedian Bob Mortimer (possibly the first time those three names have sat together in a sentence).
Released on Weird World and produced by frequent collaborator (and fellow Geordie) Sam Grant, guitarist of metal band Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, End of the Middle is a concept album telling stories from multiple generations of the same family. The core theme of the album is cyclical behaviour and generational trauma - “it’s about how we break certain cycles. I think the family is a useful metaphor to examine how things are passed on generationally” as Richard described to Line of Best Fit. Dawson is a master of painting vivid pictures with his songwriting, and on this album he does so with incredibly matter-of-fact language. He weaves laugh-out-loud humour and gut wrenching emotion into stories told as if you’re hearing it from Dave from down the pub.
This ability is immediately apparent on second track Gondola, told from the perspective of a regretful grandmother, drinking cheap wine and watching daytime TV. It’s impressive how he communicates weighty themes hidden within witty and whimsical music. It’s undeniably funny to hear him singing about “Good Morning Britain” and Piers Morgan being “on Lorraine”, but there’s many layers of bleakness in the line “Holly & Phil can pay your energy bills”. He plays this trick with joyful moments too, when the lady expresses pride in her granddaughter passing her driving test, wanting to buy her a car and take her to Venice, whilst drinking Blossom Hill out of a mug in front of “Deal or no Deal”.
Similarly on The question he pairs nostalgic guitar with a harrowing story of a young girl found with bloodied feet sleepwalking in a neighbour’s garden, after facing an apparition of a decapitated railway worker questioning where she was going.
He takes a different tact on Knot where he ties the fluctuating mood of the protagonist attending a friend’s wedding to the tone of the music, oscillating between positive and upbeat and negative and morose. The out of tune guitar and and off-key vocals sound happy when describing a golden retriever in a “waistcoat and dickybow” coming “waddling down the aisle”, contrasted to deep sonic melancholy when the protagonist describes his “self-loathing” as a “purse full of bile, whose drawstrings are this cheery smile”. Again flexing his songwriting muscles, as the protagonist gets more drunk and disorientated, the lines between this musical division become blurred, culminating in static electric guitar as a fight leaves him alone by a lake in the middle of the night.
There are some moments of untarnished joy like the cheery Polytunnel - an autobiographical song written about the escapism of spending time in his allotment (which incidentally, is where he wrote most of the album). It acts as a calming reprieve from the bleakness of the songs either side of it, much like how spending time doing something you love can be a reprieve from the relentlessness of life.
What elevates this album from very good to great for me is the final track More Than Real. It opens with a father, likely one of the characters from the earlier songs, on his deathbed, rueing the ways in which he failed in his relationship with his daughter - “In the moment I first gazed upon my bonny lass // Through a tangle of wires, tubing, sticking tape and fibreglass // I swore on her little life I'd change my woeful ways // Such a golden promise I'd break over and over again”. The father’s verse is accompanied with piano, synths and a clarinet, lending it a real heavenly texture and ends with him acknowledging he was repeating the cycle of his own father’s mistakes, and questioning how he can begin to heal.
The daughter’s verse, sang by Dawson’s partner and bandmate Sally Pilkington, makes no reference to any perceived failings of her father, as she wets his lips with a sponge and combs his hair - “I don’t know if he can hear us but I think he can // I whisper “I love you” - yes I’m sure he squeezed my hand”. The album then ends with the father and daughter singing a duet about their journey to healing.
It’s a beautiful note to end the album, which with the death of my own father less than a year ago, brought me to tears on first listen. It’s poignant how Dawson flips the approach taken throughout most of the album (bleak messaging wrapped in relatively twee musical tones), and instead finishes the record with emotive optimism in a devastating loss - that cycles can be broken.
If you liked this album, check out Richard’s trilogy of albums Peasant (2017), 2020 (2019) & The Ruby Cord (2022), each of which is a collection of stories told by characters from the English North-East in the Middle Ages, contemporary times and fifty years in the future, respectively.