With its grainy footage, the latest video from Natalie Wildgoose feels like a memory revisited, and the song’s lo-fi sound is like a musical remembering. The reflective River Days begins with tumbling piano notes, just like the babbling flow of a river, before Wildgoose delivers the beautifully melodic but completely disarming opening line: “I don’t want to go home anymore // I don’t want to go.” Wildgoose has a subtly gorgeous, warm tone to her voice, and her words are the stuff of poetry; everyday details that ground the song in reality are presented like snatched fragments of a life: cold coffee in the pot, the smell of smoke, not yet dark at 11 at night, sun-burned shoulders. There is a blissful yearning in the act of reminiscing, in this dreamy retelling of another time. River Days was recorded direct to tape between a Village Hall in North Yorkshire and an isolated bothy high up in the Yorkshire Dales. Somehow, the sense of place reinforces the song’s character and wistfulness.
Wildgoose says: “This song is a record of a single day, written that same evening, capturing the events and feelings of an early-summer day when Matt and I spent every hour by the river. We lit fires and made black coffee in the naturally worn rockpools of the stone, in the evening we cooked fresh trout and lay in the grass beds where the deer had slept the night before. I fell asleep to the sounds of the waterfalls we had stumbled across on our wanderings, and then later, in the shower, I noticed my shoulders were burned, not badly, just a small sting. Proof I had lived a little, but that would fade in a week.” It’s thought-provoking material that prompts our own internal reflections on the little we have lived.
The single is released in advance of upcoming EP Rural Hours, which is due on 15th April via state51. Having received backing from the likes of Cerys Matthews on BBC 6Music, the EP is highly anticipated. Wildgoose is touring extensively during April, on the road with LYR, the trio fronted by poet laureate Simon Armitage. After that, she has a headline show at Stoke Newington Old Church in May, before performing at The Great Escape and Deer Shed Festivals. Look out for the new songs, but immerse yourself in this authentic memory first.
