Some voices arrive like a hand on your shoulder. Bill Fay’s is one of them.
“I had near/forgotten everything”, Fay sings, opening the song not with a confession, but with a kind of quiet exhale. ‘Filled With Wonder Once Again’ doesn’t try to command attention. It barely even knocks – it simply appears, like light on the wall, or the sound of rain when you’ve been still long enough to notice it.
And it arrived, for me, at a time when stillness wasn’t a choice. At the beginning of lockdown in 2020, when days blurred and the silence grew heavy, Fay released this song – and I found something in Fay’s voice I hadn’t realised I was waiting for. It wasn’t comfort exactly. It was something deeper – recognition and a kind of spiritual steadiness. And then, “Doing nothing in the rain”, a line, so spare and casual, suddenly carried the weight of everything we were all doing, or failing to do. The lyric gives us no dramatic plot, no crisis. Just a man, a moment, and a mind drifting toward clarity.
And then, almost as a surprise, comes the chorus, “And I am filled/With wonder once again”. Not shouted, not announced – just declared in a voice worn soft by time. Fay repeats it over and over, and each time it lands a little differently. Not as a refrain, but a reminder. Wonder, here, isn’t naive or wide-eyed – it’s hard-earned. The kind you return to after forgetting it’s even possible. The kind of wonder that lifts you up, looks for something beyond you and allows you to make a connection with the world again.
But Fay’s vision is never romantic. He follows wonder with sorrow, “How this world/Can keep a man in chains”. There’s no escaping the weight of life. He doesn’t try to deny it. Instead, he places the wonder and the weight side by side, as if to say: this is how we live, this is how we keep going. And when Fay wrote the song, he had no idea that the pandemic was coming and how comforting and wonderful his song would be.
Lyrically and musically, ‘Filled With Wonder Once Again’ is so beautifully simple, but to fully feel the force of this song, you need to know a little of where it came from. Fay’s story is one of quiet resilience. A cult figure in British folk, his early 1970s albums – “Bill Fay” and “Time of the Last Persecution” – were full of troubled thoughts and hushed devotion, but the music industry moved on. Fay didn’t. He withdrew from the spotlight, worked ordinary jobs, and kept writing, privately, for decades. Then, beginning in 2012 with “Life Is People”, Fay returned – gently, without fuss – with a trilogy of albums that felt less like a comeback and more like a continuation of a conversation the world had forgotten how to hear.
In those final records, and especially in ‘Filled With Wonder Once Again’, there is no need to prove anything. His voice – trembling but assured – carries the weight of someone who has lived in silence long enough to know what words are worth saying. This isn’t performance, it’s presence.
And maybe that’s why the song meant so much in lockdown. In a world that had suddenly gone quiet, Fay didn’t fill the space with noise. He met it. And in doing so, helped me – and maybe others – remember that wonder, while never guaranteed, is never entirely gone.
And yet here we are now, on the other side of the pandemic – and of Fay’s sad death – but I still return to this song for comfort and uplift. It feels that Fay has left us something poignant – something that really does continue to fill us with wonder once again.
