Shakespeare Songs

Opening with an a capella version of the witches’ curses, spells and premonitions from the murky first scene of Macbeth and closing with ‘Jessica's Sonnet’ adapted from The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare Songs draws on the Bard for inspiration rather than setting his actual words or songs from his plays to music. Most of the tracks on the album focus on the myriad themes of his plays, and they easily accommodate the current concerns of our age. ‘You Must Needs be Strangers’ is a speech from the once-banned play The Book of Sir Thomas More and touches on migration and displacement, while ‘But Thinking Makes it So’ addresses the burdens of depression.
The players – there are ten – include Jess Distill and fellow members of her band Said the Maiden, BBC Radio 2 Folk Award winner Sam Kelly, singer-songwriter Kelly Oliver and multi-instrumentalist Lukas Drinkwater, and the music ranges from art and folk pop to subtle vocal harmonies and chamber folk. Like The Full English, and The Elizabethan Session, this is an ambitious set, encompassing very current national (and global) conversations while drawing from the Elizabethan world. Ideally, I would have preferred more Bard and less lyrical interpretation, but this remains a winning and memorable album.