Kelly Bayfield - Wave Machine (2023)

Featuring the late Paul Sartin on woodwind and violin, co-writing with producer David Booth, Kev Walford and Mike Hynes and tinged with shades of classic Laurel Canyon, Kelly Bayfield’s latest album, ‘Wave Machine‘, draws deeply on her own life and family as well as addressing environmental and political issues. That’s the case with the melodically circling opener, Vapour Trails, which, featuring Sartin on oboe, Beth Porter and cello and Ben Please on ukulele, has her reflecting on the insidious nature of satellite surveillance (“looking up hopeful with nowhere to hide/now the stars are gazing back at you”). It stays with matters celestial for the moody, folk-rock groove of Whistling Man, bolstered by Booth’s drums and featuring Scott Neubert on pedal steel, Tony Winn on banjo and Andy Trill on electric guitar and bass. It’s a meditation on the traditional concepts of an ever-present God (“he’s the wind in the trees and the ringing in your ear”) and the ironic juxtaposition of being both comforter and an excuse for oppression (“he’s got a dove and he’s carrying a gun/he’ll walk beside you and he’ll make you run… he lights the candle and he starts the fire…he leads the lambs and he feeds the wolves”).

Things get directly personal with John Mahoney, featuring Toby Shaer on cittern, fiddle, flute and harmonium, and Mats Hård on trumpet. The song is about her maternal grandfather, born in 1924 and named after his father, who fought in the Somme at 18, was called up in 1943 and married in Germany after the war; the refrain “John Mahoney won’t you please come home” refers to both his absence at the front but more pointedly how he became lost to them through dementia. The song is also dedicated to her Grandmother, who succumbed to Alzheimer’s, and her mother, who cared for them both.

The lyrics by Booth and featuring Sartin’s oboe and violin with cellist Jonathan Evans, punctuated by musical surges, the otherwise gently swaying Safe For Now, is about the nature of grief, how it can both devastate but also strengthen (“either this thing will swallow me or build a new way to live/it’s time to stand up and own this”). Grief is also at the core of Lullaby, a solo number by Bayfield, accompanied by just sparse keyboard notes, originally featured a capella on her Walkin’ album with Walford and written after the birth of her eldest child but revisited here with the lines “sleep my baby blue/‘till all your dreams come true/‘till all the angels sing for you” taking on a new resonance following the death of her husband from a brain tumour.

Understated piano, joined by Evans on cello, harpist Ruth Wall and a fiddle solo from Phil Beer, Harrier From The Marsh returns to themes of nature and the environment as she asks, “who took the harrier from the marsh/who stole the crickets from the sleepy night air/who fired the man in the moon/and who drained all the colour from the setting sun?”, as she longs “to drift among the reeds we knew before/feel the warming hand of mother earth on my shoulder” in an ever-darkening world.

Coloured by double bass and jazzy trumpet, inspired by the Suffolk countryside and the buzzards and kites in the skies, nature imagery is there too on Birds Of Prey, the lyrics echoing Ted Hughes’ metaphorical poem about man’s propensity for war, Hawk Roosting, in the line “you were made that way/to kill and not to question” as she plays on homophonic ambiguity as she asks “oh bird of prey won’t you pray for me”.

With Mark Stuart on lead guitar, the gospel-infused piano ballad Hitchhiker relates to her giving a lift to one such on a Monday morning (“stranger stranded on the side of the road/looks a little tired, he’s got a heavy load/now everybody warned me ‘bout taking company/but this stranger sure seems like a good friend to me”), the subtext being about taking a leap of faith and trusting your instincts.

Again backed by piano, Sing is a brief affirmation of her chosen vocation (“you don’t know where you’re going and no-one knows where you’ve been/but like a temple bell you were made to sing”), giving way to the return of Porter’s cello and Please’s ukulele and harmonium for the strummed title track. The song’s origins date back to the death of her stepsister from a brain tumour and a documentary entitled The Secret Life of Waves which explored both the physics of waves and the striking parallels between the life cycle of humans and our ocean-dwelling counterparts. Hynes composed a water-themed instrumental to fit the poem that Kelly wrote, again taking on a new poignancy with her late husband’s illness; the song was one of his favourites when travelling to hospital appointments.

The final two numbers both feature Sartin on Cor Anglais; the first, the punchy uptempo Anything Less, also coloured by Nick Zala-Webb’s pedal steel, is about loss and how while you may not remember someone’s words (“wish I’d paid close attention to all our late night conversations in that cold and tired kitchen with the creaking panelled door/remember your arm stretched to reach me/blue eyes to beseech me, the words you spoke that evening, I struggle to recall”), you won’t forget how they made you feel (“I will stumble over facts and figures, curse the doubt and fading details when the lights begin to twist and flicker/but I wonder as lay beside you now could I feel anything less than love?”). It ends with a final song for her husband, the sparsely strummed Travelling, begun the day he was taken to hospital, never to return, the heartbreaking lyrics essentially about giving permission to let go (“you’ve been travelling, on the run/though it’s time to put your weapons down…go on, your peace will come, we’ll learn to love again/go on, we’ll promise not to cry/just never say goodbye”), the emotion quivering in her voice.

So profoundly personal were the songs she was initially reluctant to make them public, but in sharing her heart, hopes and grief, this album may also help others heal and bring the same comfort in their times of darkness.