Charms Against Sorrow

Hannah Sanders spent much of her teens traversing the land in an old Bedford school bus, singing the traditional songs of the UK a capella to the unsuspecting public with her mum, stepfather and three siblings as The Dunn Family. In fact, most of the songs on this debut collection have been in her life since those days. Then she moved to Boston, Massachussetts, for a few years, becoming a leading expert on contemporary witchcraft and popular culture. This album didn’t begin to take shape until she returned to the UK in 2013 and happened to bump into album producer Ben Savage in the Black Fen Folk Club. It's been a while in the making.

As you might expect, her command of the songs is as impressive as her deep respect for tradition. Even such oft-heard tunes as ‘A Sailor's Life’ are brought to fresh life by the intimacy of a very live-sounding recording that's also adventurous enough to embrace the oddball torment of Michael Hurley's ‘The Werewolf’ and transform rowdy folk-club singalong ‘Pleasant and Delightful’ into something rather more tender.