The bell keeps tolling. Amelia Baker, who performs as Cinder Well, lives near a Catholic church in a small town in Ireland’s County Clare. Baker traveled here from America to study Irish music, and yet the bell sounds every day, every hour. Growing up in a non-religious, Jewish family in California, the cloistered world of Catholic Ireland must feel a million miles from home, evoking a kind of “Lost in Translation” syndrome that’s present in the sparse soundscapes and haunting stillnesses of her new album, No Summer (coming July 24 on Free Dirt Records). The detachment that comes from a worldwide COVID-19 quarantine (giving a dark symbolism to the album title) only serves to further isolate her.
No Summer unfolds slowly, thoughtfully, like a poem in the journal of a traveler. But these songs are not meant to be paens to loneliness, in fact the inspiration behind many of them came from the drive to share music, to connect with people. Baker came to Ireland for its rich pub scene, where each night master musicians cram into corner pubs to play tunes and sing songs. Searching for material to share in these sessions, she looked back to America, to the roots music that first inspired her. There she found a commonality between the two worlds, a way to reckon geography and time through song.
Before she birthed Cinder Well as a doom folk project, Baker came up in the world of anarchist collectives and protests around Santa Cruz, California. She joined Blackbird Raum, one of the best known bands to come out of this scene. Touring Europe for the first time with Raum and her side band Gembrokers, Baker played in squats and collectives, some based in complex and longstanding anarchist communities. In Amsterdam, she played a folk punk festival that first introduced her to Lankum, a band of Irish anarcho-punks that base their music on deep Dublin folk traditions. Their music encouraged Baker to carry on a path that eventually led to her emigration to Ireland to study in County Clare. Clare is the center of a style of Irish music that’s based on deep intuition and thoughtful phrasing known as “the lonesome touch.” This idea refers to slowing down the repertoire as a way to find stillness and empathy in the center of the music’s whirlwind beat. It’s an idea that Baker absorbed into her own songwriting.
Cinder Well is at the vanguard of a very different kind of folk revival, one forged in the uncertainty of these times. Her music isn’t nihilistic, instead it seeks to strip traditional music down to its bones, to the ritual healing that’s been there through the ages. It’s a healing we all need now and a balm that brings her closer to home. No Summer is an album caught between worlds: recorded in a church on the West Coast of the US, inspired by the tolling of a church in Ireland, made from the perspective of a young woman who has made a home in the space between.
Today Glide is excited to premiere Cinder Well’s video for “No Summer,” the title track new album. The first thing that comes to mind before you even here the song is the current state of our pandemic-stricken world where seasons and even days of the weeks have seemingly evaporated as all of us spend a good deal of our time stuck inside social distancing and nearly every cultural event has been cancelled indefinitely. Baker did not set out to write a song about current events, but her lyrics eerily presaged this season of canceled shows, shuttered pubs. Adding to the mood is her lonesome and ominous acoustic-driven folk, which rings with a sense of isolation. Her chorus of “No summer here” lingers in your mind long after listening while feeling painfully relevant, and it’s difficult to wrap your head around the fact that this mournful folk ballad may be the quintessential anthem of summer 2020.
Amelia of Cinder Well shares her thoughts on the inspiration behind the song:
“I started writing the lyrics for ‘No Summer’ while in the van on tour in the summer of 2018, when we released ‘The Unconscious Echo’. Summers in the UK and Ireland are generally pretty grey, but there was actually pretty nice weather that summer. So at the time I felt like it was kind of sassy and ironic to say “there’s no summer here”. Unfortunately the summer that the album is being released has essentially been cancelled due to a global pandemic, but I didn’t know that at the time.”
WATCH:
No Summer is out July 24 on Free Dirt Records. Pre-order: https://lnk.to/nosummer
Photo credit: Jim Ghedi
