Olivia Chaney - The Longest River (2015)

"Chaney's voice ... has been called one of the finest in English folk music; it only took one song to see why." Boston Globe

London-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Olivia Chaney makes her album debut with The Longest River, available April 28 on Nonesuch Records. Chaney, a recent BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards double nominee, co-produced the album at the legendary RAK Studios in London with Leo Abrahams (guitarist, film composer, and Brian Eno collaborator). The record was engineered by esteemed veteran Jerry Boys (Buena Vista Social Club, Sandy Denny) and includes Chaney's longtime collaborators, musicians Oliver Coates, Jordan Hunt, and Leo Taylor.

The New York Times said of a performance, "Whether she's singing old songs or her own, Ms. Chaney destabilizes them, turning them into rhapsodic, immediate dramas, giving listeners a reason to hang on every phrase and inflection ... Her voice holds the purity, tension, dignity and sorrow of a heritage full of songs about lost love and cruel fate. Ms. Chaney is thoroughly grounded in the past, from medieval music to [Joni] Mitchell. But in her quiet way, she's radical."

On The Longest River, Chaney balances her original compositions-including the two pieces that first brought her acclaim, "The King's Horses" and "Swimming in the Longest River"-with a selection of covers that she has newly arranged and that illustrate the broad sweep of her taste: "Blessed Instant" by Norwegian jazz singer-composer Sidsel Endresen; an adaptation of 17th-century Baroque composer Henry Purcell's "There's Not a Swain"; 20th-century Chilean folk composer Violetta Parra's "La Jardinera"; and "Waxwing," from Scottish avant-folk singer-songwriter Alasdair Roberts.