Postcards and Pocketbooks: The Best of Bella Hardy

With a career stretching back to her early teens as a member of The Pack, a 12-piece that graced the 2003 Cambridge Folk Festival, the Derbyshire singer-songwriter Bella Hardy has plenty to choose from when it comes to her recordings, beginning with Night Visiting in 2007, from which come ‘Maying Song’ and a new 2019 version of her classic ‘Tree Black Feathers’, nominated for Best Original Song at the 2008 Folk Awards, and picked by Jim Moray for his album Low Culture.

The are new versions of older songs – ‘Full Moon Over Amsterdam’ from 2011's excellent Songs Lost & Stolen, and ‘Time Wanders On’ from her first album of originals, With the Dawn – though both discs are book-ended by new recordings – ‘Sheep Crook & Black Dog’ for disc one and ‘Tequila Moon’ to close disc two.

Eschewing sequential order, these remastered recordings energetically fit up and down the years across the two discs, with three from most recent album Hey Sammy, including the opener, ‘Learning to Let Go’, four from 2015's With the Dawn – one of her best – and four from Battleplan, but not, alas, one of my favourites, ‘Tree Pieces of My Heart’. Well, you can't have everything!