Recorded in just three days, 'Love Songs' is a return to self-accompanied singing for the artist, with a re-discovery and exploration of the songs she grew up with and know so well – the songs she says ‘Are so intrinsically ingrained in me.’
Opening with an absolute instrumental treat, ‘Summer Daylight Winter Darkness’, an original piano and fiddle composition, setting the tone and heralding the welcome return after the Covid years. Gentle, mellow, evocative and yet charmingly sweet, it’s a welcome return after a few years off to widen the family with two dogs and one baby.
The well-known English traditional folk song ‘Hares on the Mountain’ follows – as fresh and beautiful sung by Bella as it was one hundred years ago when first collected by Cecil Sharp.
‘Springs of Time’ is another indelible song already signed across her soul, collected from the archives of old-English folk and brought back to the surface. This is a collection of beautiful, melodic ballads in expressed via Bella Hardy’s sublime voice. Resurrected from deep within, they are songs that have been soaked within her being so long she admits she can’t even fully recall from where they came, or how they came to be so deeply ingrained. What comes across though, is a soulful connection, an expression of genuine artistic connection.
Hardy has written two emblematic love songs for the album that sit as neatly and eloquently among the timeless traditional tunes. ‘The Navigator’s Bride’ is a narrative about the Cowburn railway tunnel that runs under the hills of Edale. Over 3km long, and deep within the land, with a ventilation shaft on the moor, it was built in the late nineteenth century on the backs of 500 navigators – or ‘navvies’ – mainly Irish, who arrived in Edale to build the tunnel and inevitably stayed. This is a love song about the prejudices of the local people who were to benefit from the toil of the navigators underground – and of course, the scandal of a farmer’s daughter who runs away with one of them.
Capturing snipped of social history in song is one of Hardy’s gifts. She also wrote ‘I Think of You’, originally for the Doncaster 1914-1918 project ‘War and Peace’,, based on a collection of silk postcards from WW1 at the Doncaster Museum.
Since her first album in 2007, ‘Night Visiting’ it’s as if Hardy has returned to her roots, her first love, fifteen years later.
Her soft and soaring voice, a cappella or with the accompaniment of producer Mike Vass and piano and clarinet of Tom Gibbs, ebbs and flows across the stories of seafarers, soldiers, sweethearts, scorned lovers and spouses of the past – told with precision, sensitivity, wisdom and the deft musicianship for which she’s renowned.