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hile in California, Kraus also came back to her guitar. “Somebody had lent me a banjo, so I’d started writing songs and picking some simple banjo accompaniments, and then I picked up a cheap guitar,” she recalls. “I remembered certain chords and I went from there. Also, I’d been playing tunes on penny whistle, and was enjoying learning tunes by ear.” She was now writing songs, working through some savage emotions. “I had a quite sad break-up towards the end of my time in Califor- nia. They weren’t about ‘I’m so sad, I’ve just broken up with someone’ but it was coming from there.”
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Her songs were lyrically sinister and musically dense, evoking both ancient ruin and modern dislocation; the UK music scene at that time was not especially primed to absorb Kraus’s very dark, folk-influenced meditations. The label that released these songs, as Beautiful Twisted in 2002, was the Australian imprint Camera Obscura; its founder, Tony Dale, had an abiding love for experi- mental forms of acoustic music. He enthusiastically encouraged Kraus. “I wrote those songs, and recorded them in a bit of a vacu- um. I was just doing things in my own head and I hadn’t yet met other people that I felt musically akin to,” Kraus says. “It wasn’t until I sent those recordings to Tony Dale, and developed a friend- ship with him, that I got a sense of there being people in the world who instinctively get what I’m trying to do.” Dale introduced her to a number of artists whose music he felt she might connect with.
Chief among them was The Iditarod, a duo of Carin Sloan and
Jeffrey Alexander, based in Providence, Rhode Island. “The Iditar- od were making psychedelic folk music, one of the first bands of this current generation to make music that had a folk element mixed in with a more experimental approach to how they use their instruments,” says Kraus, “but they’d split up by the time there was any real coverage of this style of music.”
The connection was to prove an important one. Kraus’s next release was the seasonal collection Yuletide in 2003 in collabora- tion with The Iditarod, and Jeffrey Alexander mixed her next solo album, 2004’s Songs Of Love And Loss. Kraus was now part of a supportive network, very different from the isolation that had birthed Beautiful Twisted. “Meeting bands like The Iditarod, and then Espers and Fursaxa and, eventually, other musicians back in Britain, I felt like there was a whole network of people who were working in a way that was influenced by folk music, but that was also influenced by psychedelia, and things like fairytales, Eastern European 1970s cinema and Gothic literature.”
Sharron Kraus moved to Philadelphia, now in physical proxim-
ity with like- minded musicians. “We were in an urban jungle with concrete and burned-out tyres, but we were all living in a hippie dream,” she says. “There was a big chunk of us all living together, and others would come calling. We’d put on gigs in the back gar- den.” During this period, Kraus collaborated extensively with oth- ers. She formed the group Rusalnaia with her friend Gillian Chad- wick, the pair releasing a self-titled album of eerie, earthy corro- sion. She also recorded Leaves From Off The Tree, a collection of traditional English and Appalachian folk songs, with Helena Esp- vall and Meg Baird, both of Espers. “When I was in Philadelphia, I missed singing sessions,” she says. “And one of the reasons I ended up recording Leaves From Off The Tree with Meg and Helena was because they were up for getting together, singing songs.”
While Kraus was living in the Philadelphian artist commune during the mid-decade, Britain was becoming open to thornier, slightly psychedelic folk- influenced music. The traditionally- soaked work of mavericks like Alasdair Roberts gained critical acclaim, and a new cluster of British artists, inspired by traditional music, psychedelic folk from the 1970s and American groups like Espers also emerged. It ensured that Kraus’s next solo album, 2008’s The Fox’s Wedding, found an appreciative audience in Britain that had largely eluded her previous work. It also raised some questions to Kraus about her relationship with traditional music, expressed in the 2007 album Right Wantonly A-Mumming, which she recorded with singers from the original Oxford sessions.
“It gave me a real thrill,” she says. “The first rehearsal that we had was in the pub one afternoon before the regular singing ses- sion. There were about eight singers and musicians altogether. I passed out lyric sheets, and everyone just had a go.” Kraus com- posed the songs, narrating the cycle of the seasons, in a structured – almost contrived – fashion. “For each song, I had to collect ele-
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