Tunes for a Monday Morning

Today, let's start the week off with some stories in musical form....

Above: "I Grew Up in a Room, Small as a Penny" by Ana Silvera, a singer-songwriter from London who weaves music, storytelling and poetry together in beautiful, beautiful ways. The song is from her new album, Oracles (2018), recorded live last year at The Roundhouse.

Below: "Pont Mirabeau" by Ana Silvera, with Bjarke Falgren on mandolin. The video was filmed on the Danish island of M��n by Emile Carlsen (2017).

Above: "Skeleton Song" by Ana Silvera, from Oracles (2108). The song is based on an Inuit myth about a dead girl fished out of the sea and brought back to life. The video features ballet dancer Kate Church, who also directed the piece.

Below: "Start Again" by Hatful of Rain,  a British folk and Americana band from East Sussex.  The song appears on their new lovely album, Songs of the Lost and Found (2018).

Above: "Way Up on the Hill" by Hatful of Rain, from the group's first album, Way Up on the Hill (2012).

Below: "Briar Rose" by Aoife O'Donovan, an extraordinary folk and bluegrass musician from Boston, currently touring with the I'm With Her trio. This song, rooted in the Briar Rose/Sleeping Beauty cycle of folk stories, can be found on O'Donovan's first solo album, Fossils (2013).

Above: "Mary and the Prince" by Martha Tilston, a singer-songwriter from our part of England: the Cornwall/Devon peninsula. This charming song appeared on one of her early albums, Bimbling (2004).

Below: "Stories" by Martha Tilston, from her latest album, Nomad (2017). Filmed in Cornwall, the landscape here looks much like ours at the edge of Dartmoor.

The imagery today is by Louise Richardson, a mixed media artist in Norwich, England, working with scupture, textiles, and photography. "I am currently looking at the idea of memory and identity," she writes, "bringing universal messages to the viewer, through the portrayal of objects in my own memory. The diversity of materials within my work -- both found and processed -- gives me the opportunity and freedom to invent metaphors which run parallel with the subject matter."

Please visit her website to see more of her work.