Combining personal songs with others rooted in their home brings an engaging and entertaining album.
Spread around the country, there are a surprising number of couples quietly working on music, playing gigs within easy reach of home and occasionally producing singles or albums that sell to their fans, and if we’re lucky, filter through to a wider audience.
East Anglian duo Lucy and Jon Hart are typical in many respects, but on their fourth album, they offer a set of songs which they describe as having a sense of place, inspired by their native Suffolk, which they balance with some highly personal tunes. Lucy Hart confirms that: This album has been 14 months in the making. At the start of 2025, Jon hit on a songwriting streak and decided it was time to start work on our fourth album… and here we are. A collection of songs with far-ranging inspiration. We feature a few myths and legends from our Suffolk home, as well as taking inspiration from nature around us and historic tales, but we’ve also taken a much more inward look with some poignant numbers that can only be written after experiencing something truly life-altering. “
They are unusual for taking their songs beyond a basic guitar-and-voice format. Close To The Edge starts with a distinctly Celtic flute on a song based on the Suffolk legend of the Merman, known as The Green Man of Orford. Their voices blend well together, and the upbeat tune makes an excellent album starter. Place like My Home moves down the coast to Essex to describe fishermen from Brightlingsea who planned to be at sea for three months but didn’t return for nine, and wonder what is happening while they are away. Again, sung as a duet, with guitar, fiddle, and accordion, this is a much gentler song, combining contemporary with traditional folk stylings.
Lucy Hart also designs the artwork for the album, and the central image is a bust of the Roman Emperor Claudius, found in Suffolk, and which was supposedly a trophy taken by Boudicca during her revolt in AD 60 and 61. A string quartet fills up the sound on Break from the Chain, which has a march time to it as unstoppable as the Legions. What’s left for Wishing? is the first of the more personal songs, another more upbeat tune, driven this time by percussion, fiddle, and especially a bowed double bass. It talks about the Northern Lights and wanting to share the experience of watching them.
The Air That We Breathe is another duet of which they say: “After our daughter Gracie was born, we hit on the idea of planting young oaks we had grown, and we’re now up to around 100 with more to come, little seeds for the future.” A full drum kit accompanies this tune, giving it an almost country bounce, which the Melodeon played by Archie Churchill-Moss complements. Lucy Hart sings Everything Will Be OK, a song about support in troubled times, with a clarity that shows her to be up there with the best of current folk singers. The album closes with Be Still a Cello-based song which talks about processing grief, a subject which also pops up in the earlier Rush.
In our current fragmented music marketplace, it can be hard for artists as deserving as Honey and The Bear to find the wide audience which is their due through what might be considered the traditional channels. But the compensation is that the online world often presents them to us unexpectedly, making their discovery a moment to savour.
