Jackie Oates interview: “There are so many confessions within traditional songs… it makes you wonder why they have survived in this medium”

Significant life events have long nourished the soul of the songwriter, but English folk singer and fiddle player Jackie Oates takes a different tack on her latest studio album, Gracious Wings. Conceived during lockdown and influenced by major moments in her own life in recent years, Gracious Wings instead stands back and examines the commonality of life stories and how music can prove a salve.

Of lockdown, she says, simply, “I actually really loved it,” cherishing the chance to be at home. “As a musician, I’ve spent 20 years perpetually away. Trying to juggle gigs and parenthood was tough, so having that chance to spend time with my family felt lovely. But it’s a mixed bag, isn’t it? We’ll never forget that collective anxiety that the whole world has had, and that will follow me for a long time.”

Alongside family life, Oates – who confesses she always “needs to be doing something” – found opportunity to acquire new skills, including the making of her eighth album, which comes out in September on her own Needle Pin Records. Learning “to be a bit more homespun” has also proved a necessity, as the album was pieced together in the sacred hours between the demands of childcare, her many collaborative musical projects and her music therapy degree.

And though traditional song continues to be her raison d’être, it is these pockets of time, as a reflection of her life at this very moment, that the album honours. “I’d like every album to be autobiographical, to say something about this time that I’m in, personally. That informs the song choices,” she says. “I find that they’re then all sewn together because they have a certain theme. It might be so personal that only I identify with it. Life is constantly changing and evolving, but music is the one constant.”

Her dad’s death occurring in the same week as her daughter’s birth, six years ago, and bearing witness to her mum’s recent Alzheimer’s diagnosis, influenced a burgeoning interest in music’s ability to challenge, heal and soothe. Two-thirds of the way through her study of music therapy, she is shadowing Tom Crook, a music therapist at an Oxford hospice, and it is his interpretation of his role that gifted Oates the title of the album, and its overt theme. She explains, the fascination evident in her voice. “In [Greek] mythology, when you are about to pass to the next realm, you are visited by a harpy eagle who feeds on true stories. If it likes this true story and believes it to be true, then you can pass over. [Tom] likened himself to this [harpy eagle] character, Gracious Wings, from a Philip Pullman novel, because people have this need to disclose stories about themselves [at the end of their lives] and, in doing that, they can be at peace. He is the carrier of these stories that often people can’t tell their own families.”

The album makes a connection between this and the confession motif found in traditional song. “There are so many confessions within traditional songs, and it makes you wonder why they have survived in this medium, this song medium? And why do these songs appeal to me?” she says. Song research is rarely confined to the desk, though. A self-proclaimed people person, Oates finds her songs through chats with friends, singarounds and “lots of trips to cafés with notebooks. That sort of wisdom, that oral culture, of being passed down stories, that’s my preferred way: experiencing things in real life,” she says.

Traditional material is complemented by songs of her own alongside covers of songs found outside the folk canon, something Oates has done throughout her career. “It’s partly a homage to me and my brother’s upbringing,” she says of the lasting influence of her brother, Jim Moray. “He introduced me to pop music because he is two years older and much, much cooler than me… [the songs she chooses to cover are] intensely personal songs that have stayed with me and made me feel happy and good. It’s the most personal thing I can do: to dress them up in a way that takes a little bit of my identity.” One of the covers on the album is ‘On and On’ by Longpigs. “You hear that as a teenager and you know what it means; then you hear it as an adult and it takes on a whole new dimension,” she says. Her version captures this meditation, with vocals that somehow embody a delicate nostalgia and sparkling fiddle and guitar that eschew the saccharine.

The album is augmented by musicians that will be familiar to those following Oates’ career over the years. On paper, Megan Henwood’s rich vocals would dominate, overpower Oates’ sweeter, simpler approach, but together on Gracious Wings, as on their 2016 EP Wings, their close friendship and musical kinship makes for a dynamic duo. John Spiers and Jon Wilks, who live close to Oates and have become firm friends, appear on the album, as do her trio comrades, John Parker and Mike Cosgrave, with whom she has been playing for over a decade (they tour the album together later this year). Richard Evans remains in the producer’s chair. “It felt very natural and easy to work with people I know so well,” she says. “I love what they do; I find there’s something absolutely sublime in their musicality.”

This admiration for her musicians manifests in complete trust when it comes to arrangement. “When we put together ‘Lament to the Moon’, with Squeezy [Spiers] in my kitchen, we worked together. We knew how we wanted to portray the feeling,” she says. The subsequent song reflects the intimacy of the environment and musicians that know each other inside out: Oates could be singing us to sleep as the melodeon, concertina and fiddle waltz, dream-like, beside us.

She likens this approach to landscape painting. “Painting with sound. I know the mood, I know the shape and often I’ll know the riff as well, so a lot of [the songs] are built around this motif and this feeling.” And it is feeling – pure emotive resonance – that is Oates’ true guiding force. Her work in the hospice and her immersion in music therapy might be relatively new additions to her vast portfolio of practice, but it simply shores up a consistent thread. “When you’re moved and you’re feeling something,” she says, explaining how she copes with the gravitas and responsibility of palliative care, “it’s because their experience resonates with yours.”

Listeners are likely to experience a similar reaction with Gracious Wings, finding songs that are considered and mapped against universally human understanding.

Read the review of Gracious Wings

This interview originally appeared in the October 2022 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today