Peggy Seeger “Teleology”

Red Grape Records, 2025

Iconic folk singer bows out in her 90th year on a high

We’ve maybe become quite blasé regarding announcements from artists regarding retirement, a final album or tour, only to find them back on the treadmill shortly after. At the age of 90, Peggy Seeger is adamant that “Teleology”, her 25th album, is the final curtain on a lengthy and celebrated career which, quite rightly, allows her iconic status.

Teleology” (a philosophical belief that everything has a special purpose or use) seems to Seeger to indicate that her long life has been a series of events leading to her current situation where she can say with some satisfaction that, “I am preoccupied with life, love, loss, old age and death, but I’ve never abandoned politics or the compulsion to speak up when something isn’t right.  How I got here is still a bit of a mystery, but I’m exactly where I should be right now, and I’m at peace with that.” As such, the album, while mostly reflective as on the very affecting ‘Behind The Clouds’, includes protest songs, the most direct being the punch-the-air diatribe of ‘Sit Down’ while the folky strains of ‘Sing About These Hard Times’, a charming song which could well have been recorded last century by Woody Guthrie was originally written by Seeger about 1920s America but, updated, it remains relevant. Later, she sings about refugees, first in the haunting ‘Driftland‘ and then in the elegiac ‘No Place Like Home’. On ‘Hope’ Seeger transforms what, in the first instance, is a murder ballad about a hanging into a gentle homily on that emotion, which Emily Dickinson described as a thing with feathers.

There’s some light relief in the tongue-in-cheek ‘I Want To Meet Paul Simon‘ where Seeger name-checks many of Simon’s songs in quite a jaunty manner. However, the remainder of the album is grounded in reflections of a life well lived. The title song seems to allude to a cosmic certainty that Seeger would meet a soul mate and, while it may be presumptuous of this reviewer to guess, the fact that it’s followed by Seeger’s rendition of ‘First Time I Ever Saw Your Face’, the song written for her by her late husband Ewan MacColl, seems to indicate that Seeger reckons the cosmos did her right. ‘Slow’ is a gentle trot of a song which treats the ageing process with a light touch, and on the closing song ‘Apple Tree’, Seeger, treated here to an exceptionally affectionate backing arrangement, acknowledges that she is in the twilight of her years but that the cycle of life will go on. If “Teleology” is Seeger’s last will and testament, then she surely goes out on a high, still singing, still protesting, and for that, we thank you.

8/10
8/10

 

About Paul Kerr 505 Articles
Still searching for the Holy Grail, a 10/10 album, so keep sending them in.
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