45 f The Bird Woman
Kerry Andrews, under the name of You Are Wolf, may have made one of the most original albums of traditional folk songs that you’ll hear this year. Jeanette Leech finds her perched on a bough…
“E
veryone loves birds!” says Kerry Andrew, aka You Are Wolf. “It’s not just me. There’s some- thing about birds, the
fact that they fly, and can represent that sort of freedom. I think that’s universally appealing.”
Taking flight in May, Hawk To The
Hunting Gone – previewed on this issue’s fRoots 48 compilation – is You Are Wolf’s exceptional debut album, themed entirely around our feathered friends. Its ten songs entwine folk with electronica and modern classical elements, exploring how birds have been represented in folklore and tradition- al song, and why we continue to imbue
them with human fears, joys, and sorrows. English folk music, in particular, has flocks of the things: doomy ravens, crafty cocks, stalwart swans, quixotic cuckoos.
Kerry Andrew herself is rather a mag-
pie, and You Are Wolf is one of a dizzying number of projects that she flies between. A PhD in composition, she has built a strong reputation in the modern classical world both as composer and performer, the latter especially with the vocal trio Juice. But in 2010 a different urge seized her, and it needed a new identity. “You Are Wolf started out as a way to try origi- nal things, and to explore spoken word, but quite soon I tried out a couple of folk songs,” she says.
T
he first fruit of You Are Wolf was the 2010 six-track EP, Hunt- ing Little Songs, representing this mixed approach. Her arrangements of All Things Are
Quite Silent and Lucy Wan rub against spoken word experiments and original songs and, even then, birdsong (Trainsong features chirps among its layers of sound). “During the making of that EP,” she says, “I realised actually the stuff I really love is the traditional stuff, and I wanted to do more of that. The more I did, the more I felt that’s where I wanted to go with it completely, to make it properly come under a folk banner, although I’m on the very left-field edge of that, I know.”
Photo: Dannie Price
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