Folk & World
Blair Dunlop releases “What Still Survives” on 30 October through Navigator Records. It is the British songwriter’s sixth album and Ian Grimble produces it; Grimble has worked with Mumford & Sons, Travis, Bear’s Den and Seth Lakeman.
The title points at what is left standing after a collapse, and Dunlop sets out the two sides of his musical education: the British folk tradition he grew up in and the songwriters of the American west coast. He says it with a joke inside a song —“All the songs I listen to were wrote in Pasadena, if I rip off another one they’ll give me a subpoena”— and with a line from “Trilobite”: “Survived two mass extinctions, preserved as the sea’s inscriptions.”
Fred Claridge, JJ Stoney, Holly Brandon, Ellie Gowers, Tommy Heap, Asha Jefferies and Liz Stringer play on it, and CJ Hillman’s pedal steel turns up on several tracks. There is also a new version of “Take Me With You”, the song Dunlop wrote with Duncan Haskell for the BBC’s “Countryfile” podcast.
The first taste is “Are You Loved?”, out on 18 September with a video shot live, and it is about the need to be liked online. Dunlop debuted in 2012 with “Blight and Blossom”, which won him a BBC Radio 2 folk award.
Text by Alba Puiggròs