The journey towards completing this recording has been a long and winding one. Charlotte is a singer with experience across a wide variety of genres, and David’s career in music began in folk clubs, playing traditional and comtemporary folk as well as his own music. They were both invited to perform some folk songs at an event way back in 2004, and this led to further opportunities to play together, including a BBC TV appearance. Discovering a shared love of timeless tunes and lyrics, they began working together in north London, gathering material and starting to record arrangements of songs they liked, mostly folk, mostly English – some dating as far back as the 1500’s, though some as recent as the last century. One idea of David’s was a little unusual. He’d always liked the song ‘Wouldn’t It Be Lovely’ from the musical My Fair Lady, considering it to be a song that would one day make its mark in traditional folk repertoire.
However, this labour of love took rather longer to complete than expected! Life got in the way, with each of them moving to different continents at differing times over the following decade. The most disappointing spanner in the works was the theft of the computer used for the recordings during a burglary, so the album took several years longer than expected to complete.
David: ‘I had to start the sessions virtually from scratch once I’d moved to Knoxville Tennessee. The project was saved because of the initial MP3 demo recordings of each song I’d made with Charlotte. I uploaded these into Logic and built all the instrumentation for each song around them, part-by-part, to tray and capture the performance of our live demo takes. No click-track, no automation or samples, all played live, re-establishing the feel of what had been lost. I invited Knoxville’s excellent jazz drummer Thad Brown to play drums, and Bethany Hankins, violinist and solo artist to play the violin parts. Their work has added beautiful colour and feel to the songs. In the final stages Jon Kelly (producer of Aztec Camera, Beautiful South, Kate Bush, Richard Hawley) kindly agreed to re-record the lead vocal at his London studio whilst I was over from the USA. Charlotte’s vocal performances are absolutely beautiful, bringing new inspiration and depth to these timeless songs. She’ll probably be cross with me for saying this, but it’s true!’
‘I wouldn’t go as far as to say I’m glad my computer was stolen, though taking the extra time to complete the project has really paid off, I feel. It really is a unique and beautiful folk recording, bringing new life to wonderful traditional songs. It’s received an overwhelmingly positive reaction from those who have heard it, and those assisting with the project, which is always great news! We’ve decided to release ‘Wouldn’t It Be Lovely’ as a Christmas single to promote the album because it’s such a beautiful rendition of a truly classic song. We are delighted with the interpretation and reimagining of these traditional folk songs, and hope listeners enjoy them too!’
