Fish Records - Bella Hardy

01.	The Only Thing To Do	play pause stop Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.
02.	First Light of the Morning
03.	The Darkening of the Day	play pause stop Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.
04.	Jolly Good Luck to the Girl that Loves a Soldier
05.	You Don't Have To Change (But You Have To Choose)
06.	Another Whisky Song
07.	Oh! My God I Miss You	play pause stop Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.
08.	Gifts
09.	Time Wanders On
10.	Lullaby For A Grieving Man
11.	And We Begin

The maturity and sophistication increases with each of Bella's recordings, this is a really a very good album - highly recommended

Bella Hardy's seventh solo album With The Dawn – her first since being named BBC Radio 2 Folk Singer Of The Year in 2014– isn't just the latest collection of songs from this prolific and ingenious artist. The album is an account of one year of her life. Where previously Bella has adapted and explored traditional ballads and fables to tell her contemporary folk tales, the stories that inspired these songs are her own experiences: good and bad, happy or sad.

With The Dawn is a more intimate and reflective album than before. Working with producer Ben Seal, the arrangements are more instinctive, more reactive, as befits the mind-set that informed the lyrics. Vivid brass gives way to lonesome piano; choral voices peal; banjos emerge out of beats and blips. Elements of the initial demos, sometimes recorded into a phone as the thoughts occurred, have been kept giving With The Dawn its striking immediacy.

These are songs written on the road, full of that sense of displacement, longing and contemplation that all itinerant musicians know. On With The Dawn, Bella Hardy's soaring kite-like voice is married to lyrics that poetically question everything she's seen and done up till now; letting go of expectations, both other people's and her own. But with closing lullaby And We Begin there's a light at the end... or rather the beginning. Only one song didn't spring directly from Bella's year of touring and tumult. Jolly Good Luck To The Girl That Loves A Soldier was commissioned by Songs For The Voiceless, a project which gathered the country's best folk artists to sing some of the lesser known stories of World War I.

The resulting album was one of many bold paths Bella Hardy's career has taken in recent years. From collaborating with Martin Simpson, John Smith and others on the hugely acclaimed Elizabethan Sessions, to a joint tour with Edinburgh miserablist Blue Rose Code, and an international songwriter exchange with Canada's Cara Luft who also guests on this album.

March 2015

Bella Hardy - With The Dawn

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