Alone on a Hill

Katy Rose Bennett has been performing her Americana-tinged style of folk music for the best part of 20 years. She's brought her music into community and therapeutic settings too, music-making with people who have dementia and working as a music therapist with children with autism and emotional and behavioural difficulties. She also leads community choir Moseley Voices – her 2020 compilation is aptly titled Where Does it Hurt?. One can feel the balm in her music, especially on this album of reflective, self-penned songs, comprising tiered vocals throughout, sometimes laden with echo, sometimes clear and limpid. The album's lingering spellcraft of multi-layered a cappella vocals is its calling card. The songs were written in the depths of lockdown, in an isolated house on a hill south of Birmingham. She has called it an exercise in self-sufficiency, breathing life into – in her own words – ‘songs of loneliness, isolation, connection, trees, birds, the natural world, the wind, the sun, insomnia, worry, nostalgia, belonging and gratitude for the people and things that have kept me going.’ The likes of ‘Trees’, with its abstract, Stimmung-like chorale is especially potent.