Emily Mae Winters
High Romance
EMW003
★★★★

FAST becoming a rising star on the UK Americana scene Emily Mae Winters has been compared to great artists in that cross over the folk/country genres like Gillian Welch and Emmylou Harris. In this her second album Winters demonstrates her song writing skills with wholly new compositions covering themes of travelling, growing up, following your dreams as well as standard love songs.

Winters’s voice is well suited to these themes starting with the country Ballard style through to Come Live in my Heart and Pay No Rent through to the more full band style of Wildfire and the more acoustic Folky One of Those Days.
This is an intriguing album by an artist determined to develop her own style which may not be neatly categorised as folk, blues or country.

Katherine Campbell
Robert Burns Tunes Unknown
(Birnam)
★★★★

Katherine Campbell, an established singer and Burns expert from Morayshire in north-east Scotland, has just released this album of 10 songs from the bard himself where the original tune is unknown or has been lost.

With a fine voice, accompanied by keyboards, this time Campbell has composed her own tunes which really do give a feel of Burns’s poetry. Burns’s own approach was to compose songs to a pre-existing melody.

Here the process is reversed with Campbell taking the words of his lesser known poems and setting them to music.

It’s an approach which works well with songs like Now Spring Has Clad the Grove in Green and Here is The Glen and Here is The Bower. You would have to have some interest in Burns to appreciate this album but you don’t have to be a total aficionado to enjoy listening to his lesser known poems now in song format.

Elliott Morris
The Way is Clear
Dominoes Club Records
★★★★

Singer/Songwriter and acoustic guitarist Elliott Morris has just released his second album accompanied by an ensemble band. The result is an impressive collection of new songs but which are rooted in themes familiar to traditional folk songs. With his half English, half Scottish family background and raised in Wales and Lincolnshire Morris has continued his journey playing all over the British Isles.

Starting with the title track exploring the theme of travel but with the yearning for home the album’s sleeve notes include a map pointing out the location of each song’s birth. For me the stand out song is The Wild Man Of The Sea based on a Suffolk legend of a guy who lived alone on the shore who was thrown in prison for fear he was an evil being who could do magic. Basically he was just different and have attitudes really changed?

Clearly an artist we are going to hear more of.