Claire Kelly - The Scenic Route (2021)

Raised in the Midwest and now based in Nashville, this is Claire Kelly’s second full-length release (her debut was in 2013) after four EPs, the stories therein born of her globe-trotting life work. With Kelly playing piano, mandolin and acoustic guitar to accompany her bright and airy soprano, the arrangements are kept spare, fleshed out here and there with strings, drums and producer Nick Stone’s bass and electric guitar. Politely, she opens with Thank You (Intro Song), a simple nod of gratitude to the fans who have enabled her to make music, couch surf while touring and about “how the best thing about travelling are the faces we meet along the way”.

Another song about time with friends, featuring cello and violin, written during the pandemic Dandelion Wine is waltztime Americana while the strings hang around for the softly brushed Detour about how things always fall into place, usually when you don’t expect them to. Simply fingerpicked and burnished by cello, Running Out is another life on the road themed number, here about being away from loved ones, that quietly swells with emotional intensity.

The only number reprised from the EPs is the warmly dusted, mandolin strummed The Restless and The Reckless (it appears in different versions on two of them, this being the more folksy pop-flavoured one-off Under Construction), followed, in turn, by a particular highlight in the Jorie Struck co-write The Land That Time Forgot, a gently lilting Celtic folk-influenced number about keeping things close in your heart inspired by Eilean Donan Castle in Dornie, Scotland, the final moments paring it back to just her voice and cello. It’s not the only number to nod to her roots, the other being a haunting initially unaccompanied rendering of Grace, a waltzing Irish folk song that recounts the true story of Grace Evelyn Gifford Plunkett, an artist and the Republican activist, who married her fiancé, Joseph Plunkett in Kilmainham Gaol, just hours before he was executed for his involvement in the 1916 Easter Rising.

Prior to that come the frisky, piano-based Sitting Still, a direct response to the pandemic when she and a bunch of friends decamped to a family farm to sit it out, and the lightly fingerpicked Randy, a warning to the aforementioned not to fall in love with her, ending with a reprise of Thank You as the Outro. There is though also a live recording audience singalong bonus track that shows her playful side, Jeffrey Jones being about a friend’s creepy hairless cat. I confess I’d not heard of her before, but on the evidence here I certainly look forward to hearing a lot more.