Michele Stodart - Invitation (2023)

At just eight tracks and under 40 minutes, Michele Stodart’s third album is a case of never mind the width, feel the quality, which happens to be immaculate. An album she describes as being addressed to women and “about inviting in the darkness, the hard times, the ray of light, sadness, anger, love, loss and grief… Listening to the child within, to the wisdom within, and truly connecting to all those unknown feelings that get woken up inside you. To practice staying with them, no matter how uncomfortable – to realise they are trying to guide you”. As such, the illustrations that adorn the cover and lyric booklet represent transformation, change and freedom, the crow – a shapeshifter that simultaneously dwells in both the physical and the spiritual world.

The album variously features her brother, Romeo, on piano, Will Harvey on violin and Joe Harvey-Whyte on pedal steel; it opens with the gentle and reflective piano ballad Tell Me, a song about standing on the precipice of a break-up with an unfaithful lover (“Go on and lie to me, tell me there’s no chance you’d leave / That walking out that door ain’t something you’d ever do / And I don’t stand the chance of losing you”), the mellotron and wordless choral vocals towards the end giving it the feel of some 60s Italian romantic melodrama.

Loss also underpins the equally lyrically metaphorical, melancholic fingerpicked The House (“Now the garden’s overgrown / And the weeds have taken hold of the windows / Where no light now shines through / Still I’m outside looking in / Can’t help from wondering / Will there be no trace left of her / Won’t she be hiding in those walls of yours / Did the music leave the day we closed the door…Now the house a shell that we once called home”).

Featuring strings, steel and Andy Bruce on piano, the softly, vulnerably sung Push & Pull captures the tug of the road a travelling musician feels and also the ache of missing those left behind (“They say home is where the heart is / But that ain’t where I’m going / And this cold breeze is blowing / ‘neath my jacket to my skin …Well been living from this suitcase / Since I can’t remember when / Oh the band has taken me places / That only dreams can lend / I’ve got my pockets full of crumpled notes / And yesterday’s shortcomings / Coz writing’s the only way I know / To say just how I’m feeling…I know I’m used to being out here on my own / but it doesn’t mean that I don’t always want you right here”).

Nick Pini on double bass and Stodart adding tubular bells to the mix, the moody but slightly more uptempo, smoulderingly sung bluesy shuffle These Bones treads a similar thematic path, here setting herself free of a relationship that feels like she’s set up to fail (“no doubt honey I know you’re always right / But I’ll be better off this time / I’ll be better off this time… Coz I ain’t hanging round to die”). By contrast, Harvey-Whyte on steel and featuring shimmering harp by Alice Phelps, the ethereal Undone captures that sense of being overwhelmed and set free by love (“I have come undone by you / Unspoken secret truths / Tie a knot around this breath / Like the buttons on a shirt / Underneath all this lies her / Nestled in your chest/Oh my love / The way I’ve come to want you / And how this love has awoken all inside of me”).

Harp again present and complemented by violin and viola, positivity and liberation are there too on the fragile, hesitant piano-coloured Come Dance With Me, a co-write with Immy Doman, co-founder of London’s Green Note live music venue, here though in finding the strength to rise up “When the world at your feet has been ripped from beneath / And the steps that you take are the ones you can’t see… and you find yourself wandering alone once again” and “your mask falls away leaves you stranded and small / Like this picture you’ve painted hanging tainted on the wall / And your skin feels so thin barely see you at all” as she whisperingly sings “Let’s take to the road / let’s follow no footsteps, make a path of our own”.

The penultimate The Good Fight returns to the aftermath of a break-up and separation and the cold realisations that follow (“You took back my keys and you closed the door / Suddenly strangers once more / There’s nothing I can say except it’s harder this way / But I can’t be the only one who’s fighting to stay / Gave back my records / And you cleared all the drawers / Now when I walk through this house of yours / There’s nothing left of me in this place”). It ends with the six-minute, quietly gathering, synth and steel-haunted Drowning, a giving in to but also embracing of the “dull aching pain, that anchors my shoulders”, a “burning reminder / of the mistakes I have made” as, in what comes over as an evocation of depression, she sings “I lay here surrounded by these four walls of nothingness inside of my mind … And no there’s nowhere left in this silence to hide / It creeps up on into you like a creature of the night / I’ve been wrestling with the monster drinking from my veins / Growing louder and stronger / Pulling me under her chains …Bring back the darkness where I will hide / When I’m drowning”, finding escape and relief by submitting to your feelings.

Clearly, a highly personal album informed by recent changes she’s gone through in her life, it has a predominantly downbeat air but yet still emerges as one of strength, acceptance, resilience and ultimately hope in those transformations.