A melodic suite of timeless and personal songs from an artist who creates a pastoral mood.
This is the third album release by Kelly Hunt, and her first two records garnered significant praise from the likes of Rolling Stone and PopMatters. Requiem for a Sleepless Night is likely to attract similar plaudits. This is spare, acoustic, introspective music in which one song flows gently into the next to create a mood which inexorably draws the listener in. The obvious label is ‘indie-folk’, but there is more to it than that. Yes, it clearly falls into the capacious basket of US roots music, but there are subtle hints of drone, gentle soul, bluegrass, and what you might imagine being played at the end of the night, after the audience has dispersed following a rural hoedown, from sleepy players on the veranda of an isolated farmhouse in the American South.
Hunt’s dreamy, understated vocals are backed by multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell, on mandolin, fiddle, accordion, electric and acoustic guitar, keyboards, banjo, percussion, bass and glockenspiel. Harmony vocals come from Dirk’s daughter, Amelia (and the overworked Dirk as well). Hunt plays acoustic guitar, and also weighs in on banjo and glockenspiel. They can create an almost ambient sound behind Hunt’s voice which, while quietly urgent and melodic, is also restrained, and at times nearly functions as an additional instrument. Hunt’s songs are quite spiritual, with themes of nature, seasonal renewal and personal awakening prominent. Her lyrics are strong on imagery. There are perhaps echoes of early Joni Mitchell, and of some of the female folk singers who emerged in the UK in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the feel of the songs and the very personal lyrics. The songs occupy the dreamy state between sleeping and waking when thoughts can run in many directions, both hopeful and anxious.
All the King’s Men, with its acoustic guitar backing, uses nursery rhyme analogies to make the point that love and heartbreak treat us all the same, whether rich or poor. Winter Wheat is the first of the songs in which nature images dominate, with Hunt looking to the awakening of spring to reawaken her spirits and ability to love. Fuller string backing gradually comes into play as the song progresses. Clouds is a gentle hoedown in which Hunt looks to the sky, wind and mountains to clear her mind: “While I wonder what’s the point of trying/ To wrap my heart around my mind/ – If I climb that mountain one more time/ Is anything gonna change.”
A Certain Shade of Blue has the guitar leading into a gentle, drone-like backing while Hunt sings, in melancholic mood, of the way the dusky blue of the sea and twilight remind her of her love. In Everything Has Its Time, she ponders when she will be ready to re-enter the romantic fray as the fire of her relationship is now “embers burning”, and she accepts that: “Every season of life has a setting in and a letting go.”
One of These Days is a shade more upbeat with a gentle, slurry backing of guitar, fiddle and some background vocals, while expressing mildly more optimistic hope about getting going in the near future. Homecoming has a full organic sound, and is a plaintive ode to following her heart, and not fearing what lies beyond love and death: “You can plant me anywhere and I will grow.”
Unsurprisingly, Dreamer is not a Supertramp cover (while it would not, perhaps, have been a surprise if the opener, Clouds, had been the Joni Mitchell song). Banjo and guitar lead, while Hunt bemoans the fact that she is dreaming her life away instead of facing reality, and is spending too much time in her own company. Percussion, glockenspiel, and almost hymnal voices introduce If Only for a Night, which is a mournfully plucky song about Hunt embracing her solitude: “I’m gonna be at rest/In this loneliness I fight/If only for a night.”
High on a Mountain has a real bluegrass feel with the fiddle dominant. She has reached the top of the mountain but will soon be on the move again. I Rise is a song about being fully consumed by her lover, with more overt nature imagery: “I rise high as a mountain”, “You fill me like a fountain.” Dirk Powell’s backing vocals add to the romantic feel.
The album closes with Requiem, in which Hunt deploys references to the moon, the night and twilight as she looks back on a relationship: “This is a requiem for all my fears/And all the doubts that have held me hostage here/Gonna lay to rest my old regrets.”
This is a record which combines melancholy with subdued, philosophical optimism, largely fuelled by Hunt taking comfort in nature. Socrates told us that “The unexamined life is not worth living“. Kelly Hunt has certainly taken the time to examine her life in this quietly beautiful and deeply personal album.
