Virginia Kettle - No Place Like Tomorrow (2020)

As Virginia Bennett, she released two solo albums, The Quiet Bridge and Sense of Human, and, since becoming lead singer with Merry Hell alongside brother-in-law Andrew, there have been two solo EPs. Now comes her first full album with her band The Dreamkeepers, who are, in fact, also Merry Hell colleagues Neil McCartney on fiddle, bassist Nick Davies and husband John on guitar. As such, given her songwriting input into the band, it’s not a million miles from what they do, though, having said that, the opening track, Let It All Go, is a bouncy chorus song about meeting up one last time to bring proper closure to a relationship that ended years earlier but never in a satisfactory manner. Next up, though comes the title track, a number themed around struggles with mental health that originally appeared on Merry Hell’s 2015 album The Ghost in Our House and Other Stories. Where the band’s slow waltz reading, on which Andrew sang lead, was muscular and anthemic, Virginia’s takes the tempo down slightly for a softer, fiddle-graced treatment as she sings about talking openly about problems in the hope of making tomorrow a brighter place.

Set to a skittering melody line with jazzy hints colouring its folk core, Union Jack House is the only song with a political edge as such. It offers a picture of Britain through an outsider’s eyes, conceived as a house (“the Union Jack built“) with different rooms and levels, each straining against the other. The lyrics in the verses tumble upon themselves, but, then, the music ends and, singing unaccompanied, she takes us around the back to the communal garden, fertile ground for a multi-coloured rainbow of opportunity if we learn to dig together.

Simply fingerpicked by John, Coming’ round has a pastoral feel as it extends the theme of commonality, of putting aside disagreements and sharing ideas and dreams. It’s back to a straightforward declaration of love and devotion with lyrically quirky The Butter Song as she offers to butter her lover’s bread, sharpen his arrows and weave them a blanket, as you do.

Anchored by McCartney’s fiddle, the sway-along Valentine’s Waltz is another love song, but one on which sparks fly. The song was written after watching a couple, dressed up to enjoy a night at a Spanish festival, turn from romantic sweetness into a drunken row after “a few misplaced words“. In this telling, they wish them back in each other’s arms as she sings “let’s forget the morning after till we’ve had a night before“.

It deliberately sits next to the Spanish guitar picked and echoey backing vocals of Made In The Stars, another observation of couples interacting. Inspired by Edward Hopper’s painting Night Hawks of two people sitting at a bar, the song builds in musical drama as she sketches the gulf of silence between “bodies without souls” who have drifted apart, the emptiness not “what we have lost, it’s what we have failed to find“, as each wants their freedom and to “walk in the light“.

Turning to parental love, the sentiment behind the intricately picked Growing, Growing, Gone is fairly evident from the title, written when her eldest child kicked open the stable door left home with the inevitable intermingling of sadness and relief summed up in the line “though I know you love me, you don’t need me anymore“.

Again largely backed by her husband’s acoustic guitar, unrequited love is the subject of the dreamy Moon, and is followed, in turn, with the wholly unaccompanied Spy In A Previous Life, a song written and first recorded for her Wine, Woman & Song EP (on which Growing also first appeared) on which she takes on the persona of a female spy, confessing that she wasn’t very good at it since, after a tipple or two on the bars of Amsterdam or Bonn, the red wine tended to “have a laxative effect” on her tongue.

Shaded by fiddle and chugging guitar, the penultimate country-tinged Promise Of A Sunrise picks up on the theme of making the most of what we’ve been given, of watering our self-worth and not letting opportunities wither on the vine and of using those things that wound us to build resilience and not weakness. It ends with another WW&S revisiting in Falling, an intimate love song about looking beyond that first “constellation of shooting stars” and getting to really know the person to whom you are attracted.

While No Place Like Tomorrow contrasts Merry Hell’s more rousing, crowd singalong material, it is no less fuelled by the same heart and humanity and equally warrants a place in your collection.