Ben Bedford - Valley of Stars (2023)

While Ben Bedford‘s 2019 album, The Hermit’s Spyglass, marked a new sound and direction with a large number of instrumentals, his latest, Valley of Stars, presents another swerve in taking the form of an unintended conceptual parable of a smaller-scale Watership Down that follows the journey and adventures of its protagonist, Hare, as he meets a variety of other creatures on his travels through the forest in a scary, forbidding world.

The album took shape during the 2020 lockdown as Bedford, living alone in rural Illinois with just his cat, Darwin, for company, dealing with divorce, depression and a flare-up of his OCD, the resulting songs dealing with grief and trying to move forward and confront reality while feeling vulnerable and anxious. As such, set in the Valley of Stars, the Hare is an idealised aspirational version of himself seeking connection, while other characters are manifestations of his fears, coping mechanisms and anxieties.

Accompanied by Chas Williams on guitars, Ethan Jodziewicz on bass and Kari Floyd singing harmonies, it unfolds over 11 tracks, five of which are instrumentals, his fingerpicked guitar work again evocative of Bruce Cockburn, opening with the bowed bass of Leaping, a wintery song setting the trajectory of what ensues as Hare sets out on his journey declaring “I’m going to find my friends/ I’ll know them by their open door and light within”, rich in nature imagery of “the pines and the crooked branches” and with echoes of Lewis Carrol’s language in “the whisperwood, by the burblebrook, below the skywheel”.

A lengthy acoustic guitar instrumental intro leads into the airy space of Wolves, where Hare watches a pack of wolves hunting; the song is sung from their perspective, the lyrics repetitive and impressionistic (“The dogmoon rose and we cried to see it/ the dogmoon rose and we cried to see it/ the dogmoon rose and we cried to see it/ crest the hill and lope along down/ snow so deep we cried to”).

That’s followed by the first full instrumental, the circling patterns of the nimbly picked Darkflight designed to capture the sense of Hare running through the trees, frightened by the wolves though in no danger. He continues to run in Murmurations, but here from joy, not fear (“I want to run in the sunshine and take all the time that I need/ there’s no reason to ask why the dance of the yellow star sounds like murmuring bees/ I want to run in the sunshine/ I want to fall into light”), the feel and atmosphere very reminiscent of Cockburn’s early albums as the lyrics explore nature, beauty and life, the title both a reference to the starlings in flight but also embodying the essence of the sound.

Following the jazzy instrumental outro, he takes the tempo down for Leopard and Hare, which has the former, a projection of Bedford’s state of mind, lamenting his sadness, sunk into depression and feeling no purpose to life in a world that doesn’t care. The following Hare On The Down is a fast-paced, jig-like instrumental representing Hare’s attempts to cheer his friend up that gives way to the two-part troubadour instrumental In The Court Of The Bear that finds Hare running into Bear’s forest realm; the first section slow and stately, the second slightly faster but both unfolding in the manner of a medieval courtly dance played by John Renbourn.

The tempo continues in a restrained mood for the dreamy slow waltz Adder where fear rears its head (“Run, hide, Adder’s near/ You might think all is fine/ Clean as glass/ shimmering black/ soon the night will find you”), the suggestion being that Adder might have struck out and bitten Hare, that ungrounded fear can prompt pre-emptive violent acts.

Part composition, part experimental jazz-folk improvisation, Stars & Skywheel is an eight-minute instrumental, its unsettling, hallucinatory ambience designed to suggest Hare having strange dreams under the influence of Adder’s venom. It’s followed by the final song, Weasel, Pike, Fox, & Kite, which, with a jittery bluesy bassline, percussion, and gatheringly urgent jazzy fingerpicking in 9/8 time has Hare avoiding four different predators (“Pike swims in the stream with ribbon-teeth to tear/ Fa la la la la la/ but I shall leap the green and the darkened waters there/ Fa la la la la la/ Chorus/ Fox, she stalks the ferns with sallow slavering eye, Red Kite haunts the stand of amber-twisted pine/but no feathered-foot shall catch this hide that I call mine”), metaphorically charting confrontations with danger, fear and violence.

It ends on a calm, reassuring mid-tempo instrumental note as, again underpinned by deep bass notes, Hare finds sanctuary and safety In The Shelter Of Indomitable Momma Badger, the open door and the light. Illustrated with Bedford’s artwork, in many ways a pandemic fever dream, it’s an ambitious, intricate and hypnotic conjuring of a psyche seeking to self-repair, one that needs to be heard in one sitting from start to end to gather the full effect and the final catharsis it brings.