Reviews

Hannah Sanders & Ben Savage
Album: The Stranger's Share
Label: Sungrazing
Tracks: 10
Website: https://www.hannahbenmusic.com/

Following a couple of years which saw them devoting time to projects such as lengthy periods on the road with Fairport Convention and touring with their In The Dark We Grow Band and A Winter Union, for their fifth full-length album The Strangers' Share, critically acclaimed East Anglia duo Hannah Sanders and Ben Savage return to their intimate, single microphone, roots, albeit with, once again, double bass support from Jon Thorne.

Thematically, although certainly not in the realms of a concept album, the release is centred on dreams and the supernatural, coincidentally explored seperately following the period at the beginning of 2025 after the aforementioned touring schedules, as they explain "We were both independently writing and arranging dream songs… some traditional, some our own - once we realised we had that synchronicity of thought we knew we had to try and bottle it for people."

The resultant album, the product of five days' recording in the Get Real Studios near Bath, delves deeply into Hannah & Ben's intimate, dreamy, sound-scaped world, a world inhabited by rich, sonorous and at times ethereal vocals, a perfect match for the vintage instruments used, (Ben plays a 1953 Gibson LG-2 Guitar, a Paul Beard Mahogany E-Model Dobro, and a 1989 Fender Telecaster, Hannah plays a 1934 Kalamazoo KG-21 and a 1964 Goya M-24.)

Blessed with the skill of being both accomplished singer/songwriters and expert interpreters, the release benefits from a healthy mix of originals, traditional arrangements and covers.

Indeed, three of the first four songs are self-composed, with the opener, 'The Strangers' Share', exemplifying their writing prowess. Acknowledging Kevin Crossley-Holland's version of a supernatural folk tale included 'The Old Stories:Folk Tales From East Anglia and the Fen Country' in 1997, the song examines our relationship with our land, and tells of the strangers, 'tiddy people' in the orginal, baby-sized beings with long arms, legs and tongues, who wore green clothes and yellow bonnets, and who, in exchange for offerings of grain and suchlike, would make the buds open and help with harvest. However, in time, the people forgot, or failed, to fulfil these obligations and soon everything began to go wrong.

This is followed by another song firmly rooted in nature, Springtime Queen, which imagines a fleeting meeting between Winter and Spring, with Ben and Hannah sharing verses on a fairly spartan composition where once again yellow and green feature, this time in the form of the early Winter Aconites,"the emissaries of light, pushing through the last vestiges of dark and cold."

Originally hearing it in a dream, and having had it rattling around for a few years, Hanna's guitar motif finally surfaces on a recording. Her 'Magicians', a take on the traditional 'The Two Magicians', is a shapeshifting song, a tale of what the Greeks term metempsychosis, where lovers turn into animals to be together as they move across the landscape, "Is this your shape, is this your call? The hunted or the hunter, or the biggest fool of all?".

The final original song, the eighth in the running order, is the delightful 'Times Like These', sung by Hannah, a reflective piece which references, indeed celebrates, finding moments of joy when you feel at odds with the world, as we are reminded "joy can be found in small places", a timely reminder indeed when we all seem so busy negotiating seemingly increasingly complicated lives.

The two covers on the release are interesting choices. With the first of these, inspired by the sorry tale of the closure of the blast furnaces in Port Talbot, and the subsequent destruction of the local communities, a sorry tale that could as easily have been Consett, Corby, East Moors, Ravenscraig and Shotton, Ben offers a stripped-back fingerpicked version of Bob Dylan's "North Country Blues". Hannah's delightful harmonies here add greatly to the overall effect of the despair, reflected in the lyrics, of the truth of how working people bear the brunt of change, "Come gather round friends, And I'll tell you a tale, Of when the red iron pits they ran plenty, But the cardboard filled windows, And old men on the benches, Tell you now that the whole town is empty"

The second sees a return to thoughts of dreams and our declining relationship with the land as Hannah delivers a beautifully melancholic version of Lal Waterson's 'Fine Horseman'.

Three of the remaining tracks are arrangements of traditional songs. 'Lowlands Away', the well-loved traditional night visiting song, where through a lucid dream a woman discovers the death of her lover, here, despite the heartbreaking narrative, the song is delivered by Hannah in such a way that both solace and comfort are offered. A complete change of tempo and atmosphere is presented by their version of Dave and Toni Arthur's 'Morning Stands On Tiptoe', where they have taken the original rousing old hunting song and transformed it "into a joyful ode to the breaking dawn and all that can be revealed and renewed through the promise of morning." Replete with a bluegrass-tinged, up-tempo, bright and lively beat, replacing the lines relating to horn and hounds with ones about blackbirds' song and illicit lovers somehow does not seem a stretch too far.

Then we have Ben taking the lead on what is described as a"timeless dreaminess" on 'Once I Had A Sweetheart' before the album closes with an arrangement of 'Trouble In Mind', written by jazz pianist Richard M Jones in 1924, but rooted in the spirituals of the early 1800s. Having been a staple of their live shows over the years, the jazz inflected guitar lines reflect the song's provenance, with the verses being shared once more, and whilst the subject matter encompasses the dark depths of depression and suicide, there are also elements of optimism as the author looks to the sun shining through on him some day.

Over 40 minutes, The Strangers' Share will transport you on a delightfully engaging musical journey, one indeed that is worthy of sharing with friends, and indeed strangers.

David Pratt

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