Emily Barker – A Dark Murmuration of Words
Format: CD – LP – Digital
Label: Thirty Tigers – Everyone Sang
Release: 2020
Emily Barker is an award-winning singer-songwriter, best known as the writer and performer of the theme to the BBC’s hugely successful crime drama Wallander starring Kenneth Branagh.
She has released music as a solo artist as well as with various bands including The Red Clay Halo, Vena Portae and Applewood Road (with whom she released a remarkable album of original songs recorded live around a single microphone, dubbed “flawless” by The Sunday Times) and has written for film, including composing the soundtrack for Jake Gavin’s lauded debut feature Hector starring Peter Mullan and Keith Allen.
As a performer, Barker is captivating and accomplished, with an adept understanding of audiences that finds her equally at home touring with punk troubadour Frank Turner as she is with American multi-Grammy-winning musician Mary Chapin Carpenter.
Produced by Greg Freeman (Portico Quartet, Peter Gabriel, Amy Winehouse) and recorded with an incredible band featuring Rob Pemberton (drums, percussion, synth, backing vocals), Lukas Drinkwater (bass, guitars, backing vocals), Pete Roe (guitars, keys, backing vocals), Misha Law and Emily Hall (strings), ‘A Dark Murmuration of Words’ searches for the invisible connections that shape a rapidly shifting modern world.
Recorded at StudiOwz in Pembrokeshire, Wales, the album is a timely exploration of climate change, racism, sexism, and myths of economic progress through the lens of what it means to return “home.”
Tracks:
01. Return Me
02. Geography
03. The Woman Who Planted Trees
04. Where Have the Sparrows Gone?
05. Strange Weather
06. Machine
07. When Stars Cannot Be Found
08. Ordinary
09. Any More Goodbyes
10. Sonogram
Website: Emily Barker