It all started with a Facebook post. Wandering around the mazelike streets near his home in Dublin during lockdown a few years ago, Adrian Crowley was inspired to take to the social-media platform to share an experience. “It was night-time, really dark,” the Galway-born musician says. “I like taking photos at night-time, too, and everything in that moment seemed to converge and tell me that this was a moment that I wanted to mark, in what I was seeing, feeling and hearing.”
What Crowley had in his headphones on that walk was Death Had Quicker Wings Than Love, a collaborative album released by the English folk singers Marry Waterson and David A Jaycock in 2017. Crowley had already been familiar with Waterson (daughter of the late English folk titan Lal Waterson) and her work, which has spanned decades and many collaborations. “I would’ve heard her, of course,” he says. “And I felt I knew her voice very well. Her late mum is one of my favourite singers too, it has to be said. But that’s the first album where I dived in deeply.”
Waterson saw the post and quickly responded with a proposition. “At the end of that long walk I noticed there was a message from her saying something like, ‘If you ever want to work together, I’m a serial collaborator,’” Crowley says, smiling. “So the next day I wrote back and sent her something that I had written as a taster. It could have just been one song, for all we knew – we didn’t really know what we were working on, at the start.”
The pair began sending lyrics and melodies back and forth via email and voice notes without ever meeting face to face. Several years on from their online introduction, they are about to release their collaborative album, Cuckoo Storm, a modern folk album in its construction but with a timeless, homespun feel. Their voices work beautifully together, Waterson’s sinewy melodies providing a splendid foil for Crowley’s ruminative murmur.
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“I was fortunate to sing and learn my craft alongside my family, recording with them when I was 12 years old,” says Waterson. “It was an easy thing to fall into, as I was surrounded by song and my voice carries that Waterson DNA. It’s naturally ‘folky’, although I’m open to all genres in support of a story. But we both have lower-register voices, and I immediately liked the way our voices sounded so intimate.”
Having come into folk from very different backgrounds – Waterson, as she says, was born into the Waterson-Knight-Carthy folk dynasty, while Crowley found his own way into that world – they agree that their immediate common ground was words.
“I think Marry and I both appreciate strong lyrics and attention to lyrics,” Crowley says. “And I do feel that she was very clear about voicing that, too; she got very excited when I first sent her lyrics, actually. She was, like, ‘Where did that come from?’ so it was really nice to share that excitement. And vice-versa – she would send me something and I’d go, ‘Those words!’ There was this mutual fascination. So it wasn’t just about singing; it was about words.”
“My writing first began as poetry,” explains Waterson. “I don’t play any instruments or read music; rather, words appear, phrased in a way that suggests music. With melody comes rhythm. I sing voice memos and send them to collaborators.”
I’m still learning to call myself a musician. I don’t play an instrument as such – but my voice is my instrument. And in writing tunes to some of Adrian’s words, I’ve moved on
They each brought an even number of songs to the album. “In the duos I’ve worked with before, I wrote most of the lyrics, so it was a change to write melodies for someone else’s words on three of our collaborations,” she adds. “Maybe a musician wouldn’t immediately think of me to write a melody when I don’t play an instrument, but I come at it from a different starting point. Singing a cappella is freeing. So I would say poetry is our common ground.”
They both single out The Leviathan as one of the album’s key tracks. Crowley recalls growing frustrated as he worked on the song’s lyrics at his desk, instead retreating to the nearby seafront at Clontarf for a walk, notebook in hand. “I sat on the grass, and in one splurge I wrote all the lyrics to The Leviathan,” he says. “I sent them to [Marry] immediately, and the next day I got a ping on my phone – and it was her singing the words that I’d just sent her the day before. So then, with that as a blueprint for the song, I began constructing music around it. That was a typical way that a song came about. And it was maybe after two or three songs that we said, ‘Shall we keep going to try and make an album?’”
Their approach to songwriting differed slightly. Crowley initially wrote one song, Heavy Wings, several years ago, inspired by the real-life 19th-century story of L’Inconnue de la Seine, or the Unknown Woman of the Seine, about a young woman who was pulled from the French river and whose eerily peaceful death mask became a fashionable fixture in many homes in France. Crowley had attempted to record it for one of his own records, but could not quite get it right.
“And then, quite far into the project with Marry, I thought, I’ll send her Heavy Wings and see what she thinks. I actually thought she might say, ‘That’s too heavy. It’s too much!’ But she came back and said, ‘Yes. Yes. Yes. I’m going to sing this.’” He smiles. “And she did, and I thought, ‘That’s it.’ It was a great feeling. It gave me goosebumps to hear her singing it.”
Waterson often uses the “blackout” technique for writing lyrics. She used it on the album tracks Undear Sphere and Distant Music to great effect. “It was composed by skimming the pages of a church jumble-sale book and removing – or blacking out – parts of the original text until only certain words and phrases remain,” she explains of the latter. “I love this way of working; it’s organic, with unpredicted results. A bit like doodling.”
Another track, One Foot of Silver, One Foot of Gold, was originally a lyric written by her mother, Lal, who died in 1998. “The lyrics were a tribute to the French poet Arthur Rimbaud,” she says. “So I picked up where she left off and wrote a melody. As I sang a little garden bird came to the windowsill, as if listening. I hoped it was a happy augury, as a lump came to my throat. I had to stop mid-recording to cope with the idea it might be her returning to say, ‘What are you doing to my song, you bugger?’”
She feels her mother’s presence even now, she says. “Our voices are alike, and sometimes I could swear she has popped in and sung bits, even though I know it was me. I think she would be very excited to hear these creations. Illness often prevented it, but she longed to write and sing with other like-minded artists.”
Having written the album online, Crowley and Waterson didn’t meet until two days before they were due to begin recording. Crowley was picked up by Waterson at a deserted Scarborough train station in the dead of night, and taken to her home in the picturesque village of Robin Hood’s Bay, where they rehearsed for two days before travelling to the studio of the producer Jim Barr, in Bristol, to record.
“I came down the stairs and there was daylight streaming in the windows,” Crowley recalls. “I walked into the kitchen and looked out the kitchen window, and – I kid you not – it was the most incredible view I’ve ever seen from a house. It looked like some sort of CGI image on the window.” He laughs. “We had something to eat, some coffee, sat down in her beautiful, cosy sitting room, with the fire burning, and started singing the songs face to face for the first time ever. Then we went for a long walk through the village, down to the harbour, all these tiny winding streets. You felt like there were ghosts of smugglers walking down the laneways. It was amazing.”
There are no plans to tour Cuckoo Storm at the moment, because Waterson’s husband is being treated for blood cancer, “and, depending on where his cycle is, I have to simplify life to be able to cope”, she says. Nevertheless, the two artists agree that they have realised certain things about themselves during the long gestation period of this beautiful record.
“I am a mixed-up introvert/extrovert and sometimes lack confidence,” Waterson says. “I’m still learning to call myself a musician. As I said earlier, I don’t play an instrument as such – but my voice is my instrument. And in writing tunes to some of Adrian’s words, I’ve moved on.” She smiles. “Years ago, I said to our Martin [Carthy] that I couldn’t play; I needed musicians around me to turn poetry into song. He just smiled and pointed to my mouth. Good ol’ Mart.”
“I realised that I’m a supple artist, I think,” Crowley says. “Working alone, you may not notice that about yourself – but this was a very different thing. It wasn’t just about how I saw something; it was about how we both saw it. It taught me that I was able to do that, and not feel like I was compromising anything. I think it’s good to discover things about yourself through living experiences. There’s always room to learn something new.”
Cuckoo Storm is released on One Little Independent Records on Friday, March 8th
