serpentine smiles

Sometime this summer, I rediscovered my fic writing muse. Which has been great, but has unfortunately also meant that I’ve fallen quite behind on writing up my monthly albums - I have several months of backlog! Fortunately, I have still actually been listening to the albums and noting them down, so I’ve been able to look back at my list and write them up.

First up, we’re all the way back to the summer, for my August album, which was Fable by Ainsley Hamil. (I really thought I’d at least started this post, I definitely remember sitting down in the days after the gig with the album on and the intent to write about it. I suspect I probably started writing it into the ‘create entries’ page and lost the draft.) I mostly know Ainsley Hamil as a Gaelic singer - competed for the Gold Medal at the Mod a couple of time - and this album is split pretty evenly between songs in Gaelic and English, with a Burns number thrown in for good measure. Personally I think if we’re talking traditional Gaelic modes, she’s better suited to puirt-a-beul than the strictures of the Gold Medal - I’ve seen her do puirt live and she’s very good, it’s not easy to keep up that level of articulation at that speed especially not in the middle of a gig! She has such a rich, warm singing voice, it’s a pleasure to listen to her sing, and always so tempting when the album finishes, to just stick it on again for another play through!

Unusually, I was listening to this album extensively because I was going to a gig, rather than going to the gig because I’d been listening to the album a lot. My local art centre hosts a folk music festival in a tent on it’s lawn every summer. (Not in one intense weekend but two bands per session, two sessions a night, five nights a week across two months.) Living near by and being a regular gig go-er, I go to a lot of these sessions, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, sometimes pre-planned, others spur of the moment because I walked past and thought ‘oh they’re good’ and stayed. The Ainsley Hamil gig was planned fairly far in advance, as a friend texted me just after the programme came out and asked if I fancied it, and as I did and it was a day I was on a helpful shift, we booked it and went. As it was her idea, and I’d agreed on the basis that I remembered what I’d heard of Hamil’s latest album being good, I thought I better swat up beforehand.

(It’s a lovely album, but gosh, live really is her forte, she was such a compelling and warm presence on stage, making her music come alive. In both Gaelic and Scots, her delivery on the album is more precise and probably more technically correct, but live she was so much more natural and felt much less constrained.)