Afterwards
The Afterwards (now £5 from www.wovenwheatwhispers.co.uk) was recorded after six years of learning and writing songs. It has on it some traditional favourites: The Blacksmith, The Selkie, John Riley and My Johnny was a Shoemaker/Drousy Maggie. The rest are songs written over the years including settings of Emily Bronte poems, Lullaby and Come the Wind, and some written in a more contemporary style: Flames on the Water, Dancing on Sinking Sand, Your Reflection, Hey You. I watch o'er the Ocean, was written in a traditional style, with recorder accompaniment, to the tune "Queen Jane" (who married King Henry VIII). On the CD Susie plays the 6 and 12 string guitars, descant and treble recorders, clarinet and bodhran. Oh, and sings.
After Afterwards......
New songs were being written regularly written up to 2006, at which point the composition of non-vocal music, and arrangments have taken a precidence. Words however, cannot be held back, and so poems have emerged and can be read on www.susiefox-poetry.co.uk During the post-Afterwards phase, Susie explored a more rhythmic sound using a soft plectrum to drive the songs along. The melody line is still all important, and the words tend to be symbolic, although influenced by personal experience none-the-less. Examples of this style are Indigo Sky and Empty House. Other genres are explored. Jack and Susie thoroughly enjoyed the playing of Kieran Means and Sara Grey, and have adapted Little Red Rocking Chair and Rain and Snow for their repetoire. Susie added dramatic blood thirsty killings to Rain and Snow - the inference as to what happened in the traditional version is made gorily clear in Susie's. And the audience love it.
2009
There was a dearth of new songs in 2007 and 2008, mainly because Susie was heavily involved in creating websites, writing poetry, arranging music (for Jack) and taking part in the River Festival in York. However, the highlight of 2008 was Perthshire Amber, and since then several poems have emerged, and two songs, "The Great Oak" and "It's All So New My Love" have been written, based on symbology and imagery of Loch Tay in Perthshire.
It takes 2 minutes to download inspiration, 10 minutes to write a song, 15 minutes to re-write it, 20 minutes to write a tune, and 100,000 hours of guitar practice to create an interesting accompaniment in non-twee chords that won't bore the audience. So.....world premiers in Heminbrough April 2009. How could you miss that.
And if you do, no doubt these songs will be repeated at Thorganby, The Black Swan folk weekend, and Nature's World too.