Collins, Shirley - Heart's Ease
SKU
39-CD-WIG-454
“When Shirley Collins first returned from nearly 40 years of obscurity, she came carrying darkness. For two decades, from the late ’50s until the end of the ’70s, Collins was a star of the resurgent British folk scene, her voice as soft and strong as a single ray of sunshine cutting through dense fog. She was adventurous, collaborative, and scholarly, having accompanied former partner Alan Lomax on foundational field-recording treks through the American South and returned to become one of England’s most vital links between past and present. But the trauma of a bitter divorce left her unable to sing, so, like several of her contemporaries, she retired from music for almost half a century.
On Lodestar, her dramatic 2016 return, she favored folk standards of deceit, disappointment, and death. Babies were thrown overboard. A woman found her drowned lover only to die alongside him. Even “Old Johnny Buckle” turned his back on his wife to drink with the devil.
A hum of existential anxiety again permeates Heart’s Ease, the second album of Collins’ relaunched career. A steam-powered icebreaker gets trapped in the Arctic waters above Canada. A young lover mourns her beloved dead sailor. A pair of star-crossed, would-be lovers eternally join one another only in the graveyard. But on these 12 elegantly rendered songs—taken from the crowded pews of Alabama and the rugged hills of Arkansas, from the country spreads of England, and the archives of Collins’ own family—she offers visions of beauty and hope, her voice full of the kind of experience and nuance that foster trust. Even life on that icebound ship from “Locked in Ice,” which is “doomed to travel endlessly,” seems tolerable: “Where the ice goes, I go,” she sings with a calming sense of acceptance.”
- LabelDomino
- UPC887828045426