Fern Maddie - Ghost Story (2022)

Multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter Fern Maddie may be a relatively new name on the folk scene but her debut, Ghost Story, is an extraordinary tour de force.

Ten tracks make up the album, with a mix of original and traditional ballads. At times it is fascinatingly difficult to tell original songs from traditional ones demonstrating Maddie’s innate engagement and affinity with folk history. But there is no slavish pastiche here; songs have to earn their place, and Maddie plays confidently with experimental folk sounds. Tradition may be respected, but it should be equally and rightly tested.

Maddie’s biography presents a tantalisingly romantic narrative too. She was raised in a family of artists and musicians and was heavily inspired by her late father, Mark (a composer and pianist). Today Maddie lives deep in the mountains of Central Vermont in a “tiny cottage in the woods, where she tends goats, dogs, and feral gardens”. It’s a mark of Maddie’s reverence to history that she prefers the area’s traditional name – N’Dakinna, the ancestral homeland of the Abenaki, Pennacook, and Wabanaki peoples.

It’s here, deep in the woods, that Maddie experiments with her various influences and instruments; Old-Time string band music to 60s and 70s British folk provide rich roots here, whilst dark country, folk-rock and the trad renaissance all make self-confessed appearances in Maddie’s sound too.

There are touches here of Rhiannon Giddens, no bad thing, but Maddie’s clean, crisp voice is very much her own, particularly so on songs such as the opener ‘Maid on the Shore’ and ‘Northlands’, whilst ‘Green Grass Growing’ is a fine banjo instrumental illustrating Maddie’s talent as a musician.

Maddie plays the majority of the instruments here – with a focus on banjo, guitar, bouzouki, accordion and melodica, whilst producer Colin McCaffrey accompanies on bass, viola and fiddle, with bones by Ari Erlbaum, percussion by Noa Zacharuk and pipes and whistles by Oliver Zeichner. Also, Synth makes an appearance as a scratchy, almost visceral background on Maddie’s superb interpretation of the traditional Scottish song ‘Ca’ the Yowes’.

Particular highlights include the twisting of narrative on ‘Hares on the Mountain’, a brooding take on the traditional ballad, whilst ‘Wool Gathering / Under Snow’ is a rather fun and spirited instrumental. It starts forebodingly but soon emerges into a bright and playful little tune.

There is much warmth here, especially on the beautifully poignant closer ‘You Left This’. Here, Maddie intimately repeats the lines “dark door closed on all your plans / so you left this in my hands”. It’s a heartbreakingly fragile and movingly simple song. Indeed, it’s not difficult to see the track as a tribute to her late father, and it is a touching conclusion.

Fern Maddie’s debut is strangely timeless but thoroughly topical, too, with nods to contemporary politics and social history, all imbued with an eclectic yet evocatively atmospheric sound; Ghost Story is an astonishingly confident and accomplished debut and a superb follow-up to the 2020 EP, North Branch River (a track from which featured on the Folk Show here). Fern Maddie is a name we will hear much of in the future, and Ghost Story is a spell-binding, beautifully captivating and genuinely haunting release – an immediate favourite of 2022.