Press Release Stone’s Throw, Lament of The Selkie
This Summer sees Hushland Records release Rachel
Taylor-Beales fourth studio album, a tragic folklore concept tale entitled
Stone’s Throw, Lament Of The Selkie.
Taylor-Beales has brought together her ever-growing
and eclectic grouping of musicians to this project, Paul Gray (formerly of The
Damned, UFO, Eddie and The Hotrods) guests on bass and acclaimed virtuoso
guitarist Dylan Fowler returns providing slide guitar and sonic textures. Lucy
River’s versatile violin nuances a folk edge to the songs, whilst Angharad
Evans backing vocals and Rosy Robinson’s cellos enhance with rich harmonic
textures and tones. Rachel’s own brother Shane Beales makes a guest appearance
on percussion leaving the rest of the breadth of instrumentation to her husband
Bill and herself, including guitars, piano, organ, ukulele, percussion and
bass. Rachel moves away from acoustic guitar strains for the majority of this
album, replacing them with her own electric guitar playing. The overall vibe is
a rich and intricate sound palette that embeds the album’s narrative in Taylor-Beales
evocative sonic world.
The album itself is based around Selkie mythology from
the Orkney Isles and charts the tragic story of Selkie, who over the arc of the
narrative finds herself struggling and unable to sustain life on land with her
land-bound partner and eventually returns herself to the sea leaving her
partner grief stricken with loss.
“With the title track
Stone’s Throw, I imagined Selkie as a refugee in a foreign land, a beautiful
exotic being now working in a seafront kiosk, selling seaside tat and chips and
tea. To me she was a refugee both in circumstance and in spirit. Having read
reports of a seal being found hiding under a car in California earlier this
year as a result of the warming oceans and the consequence of changing availability
of food source, this image of the Selkie refugee has solidified in my mind.
I must admit to being
worried that it would all be just too depressing, this tale of a seal-woman,
whose life and loves break down to the point where she falls back into the sea
leaving a devastated partner to grieve her… and I wrestled with the urge to
lighten the content, but in the end the muse won out. In my personal life the last
few years many folks around me have suffered loss. We’ve seen friends struggle
with miscarriages, we’ve experienced the loss of a friend to suicide and the
loss of family and friends to disease and we’ve seen relationships and
marriages falling apart around us. This struggle with loss is a real and
unavoidable part of life and the Selkie stories became a vehicle for me to
process and retell something of this deep sense of loss in a way that is both
personal and universal at the same time. I hope that as well as the dark
themes, folks will be able to experience a beauty in the music I’ve created-
that’s the intention anyway!”
The last few years Rachel has herself been no stranger
to struggle,
“I
fell from a high stage while on tour in Italy in the May of 2012. I was 5
months pregnant and will never forget the fear that the fall had harmed the
baby. Fortunately my baby was fine, but I sustained injuries to my back and
hips that took a long time to fully recover from. It was over a year after the
incident that I was finally signed off from physiotherapy and then I had to
begin to regain core strength as my muscles had completely atrophied from such
lack of mobility and I found that I was unable to sing with any clarity or
strength for quite some time. As I regained my core strength I ended up re-recording
nearly all of my initial vocals as it became increasingly apparent that the
earlier ones just didn’t cut in comparison.”
The album has taken a full three years to make from
start to finish, and has been produced, recorded, mixed and mastered by Rachel and
Bill in their own Hushland Studios.
“It's been great developing our own studio and Bill and I have very much enjoyed working together on this album. I’ve
never worked on a project for this amount of time before, at times I felt as if it wouldn’t ever be complete, but it is
such a satisfying experience to have seen it through, to be coming to the other
side of my own physical battles and to now also have a product that I’ve been
able to prune and hone in a way I’ve not done before. I’m very pleased and
extremely proud of the finished album!”
Stones Throw, Lament of The Selkie is released on
Hushland Records July 22nd 2015 and can be ordered via Bandcamp http://www.racheltaylor-beales.bandcamp.com
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