Tunes for a Monday Morning

As rain drums on the studio's tin roof and a cold autumn wind strips leaves from the trees, here are songs of shelters and ruins...of tumbled stone walls half-buried in ivy...of the death of the year that gives birth to the new...of the losses that make way for new beginnings.

Above: "These Ruins," a new single by Bernadette Morris, from Co. Tyrone, Ireland. She has one solo album, All the Ways You Wander, 2013, with a second due out next year.

Below: "Green Unstopping" by The Rheingans Sisters (Anna & Rowan Rheingans), from the Peak District of Derbyshire. The song appeared on their lovely third album, Bright Field, 2018.

Above: "House on a Hill" by singer/songwriter Olivia Chaney, from Oxfordshire. The song, which was written and filmed in her family cottage on the North York Moors, appeared on her gorgeous album Shelter, 2018. (For a live version of "House on the Hill," plus Chaney's "Roman Holiday," go here.)

Below: "The Old Churchyard" by Offa Rex (Olivia Chaney with The Decemberists). The song is from their collaborative album The Queen of Hearts, 2017.

Above: "Young Water Eyes" by Words of a Fiddle's Daughter (Adam Summerhayes and Murray Grainger of The Cinderhouse Rebellion, with poet Jessie Summerhayes), from North-East England. It appears on their new album of folk-tone-poems, r��nian (Anglo-Saxon for ���whisper���).

Below: "The Same Land" by Salt House (Ewan MacPherson, Lauren MacColl, and Jenny Sturgeon), based in Scotland. It's a soul-stirring song from their stunning new album Huam (a Scottish word for the call of an owl).

The Dartmoor photographs above are by our good friend Stu Jenks, an American photographer based in Arizona. (They were taken on a visit to Dartmoor a few years ago.)

For a previous post on the folklore of hearth & home, and magical houses in fantasy literature, go here. For a post on "home, land, and the view out the window," go here. And for a post on the mythos of moving, and "hefting" to a new home, go here.