Old Stories

If ever an album proved that while good musicians can play complex stuff, it takes great ones to

play simply, it’s this one. Following her wonderful Young Hearts EP of disco covers, which – like, say, Richard Thompson covering Britney Spears – exposed the timelessness of great pop songwriting by making it sound ancient, sometime Memory Band vocalist Nancy Wallace here makes some of the most wonderfully subtle modern folk. Three traditional songs and six originals over a flawless 30 minutes cover all the great lyrical themes (love, loss, dreams, friendship and finding dead sailors on the beach), and are built on arrangements of fingerpicked guitar, squeezebox and hurdy-gurdy that take the breath away with the perfect simplicity and balance of their structures. Nancy’s soft vocals, too, are delivered with minimum embellishment, but carry the strength of absolute assurance where so many “nu folk” vocalists seem simply faux-naif in their breathiness. Truly, a triumph for understatement.