Darwin Song Project review

The Darwin Song Project receives its second (and possibly final) full airing with all 8 participants on Saturday night at the festival.

The disc is officially released on Monday 31st August, and will be available at the festival...the reviews are beginning to come through, here's one from Netrhythms

"Song projects featuring an assemblage of individually talented singer-songwriters have a bit of a chequered history, some amounting to nothing more than a thinly-veiled personal showcase for the artists that’s at best tenuously connected to the project’s theme.

The Darwin Project, however, is an honourable exception, for it displays a spirit of genuine artistic collaboration between the contributors, a special alchemy that I’m guessing is attributable to the good sense and vision of its director Neil Pearson in bringing together an ideal mix of participants who between them encompass a wide range of songwriting experience and styles: established masters Chris Wood and Jez Lowe; veterans of similar exercises Karine Polwart and Emily Smith; acclaimed American artists Mark Erelli and Krista Detor; and rising younger stars Rachael McShane and Stu Hanna. It’s even more of an achievement when you consider that most of the eight participants hadn’t even met beforehand, and that extraordinarily, they managed to get all the songs written during one week-long songwriting retreat in early March of this year and ready for performance at a public concert less than a fortnight later – an occasion that provides the source recording for this disc, which has been brilliantly mastered by Stu Hanna himself. The Project has already been the subject of features on BBC Radios 2 and 4, and the songs are due to be further aired at this year’s Shrewsbury Folk Festival.

This 72-minute CD succeeds in capturing the magic of the occasion, and features 17 of the 19 songs performed at the concert. The eight artists each appear in both lead and supporting roles (there being no purely solo outings), and the instrumental settings actually feel spontaneously conceived, almost semi-improvised and coming together in performance stage rather than being consciously pre-arranged.
The songwriters’ brief was to create new works that have a “resonance and relevance” to Charles Robert Darwin (naturalist and “father of modern evolutionary theory”), who was born in Shrewsbury two hundred years ago (in February 1809). Darwin’s great-great-grandson, Randal Keynes, addressed the writers at the start of the week, furnishing them with unique insights and eloquent anecdotes which clearly much inspired the resultant songs, which surely do Darwin’s memory proud.

The first few songs portray snapshots from Darwin’s life; intriguingly, he sets sail on the Beagle to the tune of one of his great-nephew Vaughan Williams’s folksong settings! On Rachael’s reflective Heavy In My Hand, Darwin ponders his initial decision to decline the offer of the trip, after which on Chris’s masterly Turtle Soup he relishes the exotic adventures to come and portrays them with a keen sense of wonder before darker overtones and realisations creep in. Jez’s tale of Jemmy Button examines the familiar theme of the return of the native, while reactions to Darwin’s theories come from the confused man-in-the-street (Stu’s The Merchant’s Question) and an indignant American (Krista’s Emma Brawley), finally being summarised in Jez’s fond jolly-jape pastiche outlaw-ballad We’ll Hunt Him Down.
The grandeur of the miracle of life itself is conveyed by Mark’s Dylanesque Mother Of Mysteries (with beautiful harmonies by Karine) and the Boyesen-poem-inspired Mother Of My Soul, while other songs intelligently address the central theme and conundrum, the conflict between faith and science, which so preoccupied Emma, Darwin’s cousin (later to become his wife). Emma’s personal feelings and worries regarding the gulf between these two belief-systems, and their effect on Charles, are explored on the powerful trio-song Will You Be Waiting?, while Save A Place (sung by Emily) is a tender personal entreaty by Emma for Charles to remember her while at work. The sheer cruelty of natural selection is brought home to Charles by the death of his daughter Annie at age 10, conveyed extremely poignantly in the pair of songs at the core of the set – Emma’s Lullaby (sung by Krista) and the especially moving We’re All Leaving (sung by Karine) – having been also eerily alluded to in Mark’s earlier Kingdom Come. Then, two songs towards the end of the set muse on the implications of Darwin’s theory: Krista’s soulful-gospel Clock Of The World and the concluding rousing acappella of Chris’s sacred-harp-like hymn You May Stand Mute, an exhortation to us all to lay aside our opposing factions and unite in love and humanity.

Each of the songs is strong enough to stand alone outside the context of the project, although the performances on this disc will always be special. The digipack presentation is exemplary too, with booklet containing full lyrics and background notes. The project can be judged both a resounding artistic success – a massive credit to all concerned – and a fitting celebration of one of Shrewsbury’s most famous sons."