Americana from the Mersey: She’s In The Trees ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’ Album Review
The plains of Andalucía are well-known for providing a backdrop to spaghetti Westerns – with a little Hollywood magic, you could swear you heard the call of a coyote in that sprawling Spanish desert. For more than a decade, this ethereal landscape was also the backdrop for singer Amy Scott-Samuel’s adult life. Having met Jules Watts (guitar) and Tristan Appleby (violin/bass), she settled back in Liverpool to form She’s In The Trees, an Americana-tinged folk outfit whose capacity for storytelling stretches far beyond the Mersey.
If starting the band was a homecoming of sorts, their debut release The Heart is a Lonely Hunter refuses to be pinned to one place. The band still have strong ties with Spain, signing with Lucinda Records and completing a tour there earlier this year. Meanwhile, their music has a yearning, itinerant quality, bringing together bluesgrass elements, poignant string sections and Scott-Samuel’s distinctive voice, which combines a purity and pluckiness not a million miles away from singers like Neko Case.
Taking its title from a Carson McCullers novel, this record shares the author’s spirit of adventure. By the time her first book came out at 23, McCullers had traded the piano lessons and Sunday prayers of her upbringing for a New York boarding house, identifying more closely with the misfits she wrote about. Just as her novel documents the struggles and frustrated dreams of drifters in 1930s Georgia, She’s In The Trees channel feelings of isolation to paint darkly resonant stories of chance encounters and loss, turning ephemeral moments into timeworn ballads.
Openly bookish, they also harness the romantic spirit and nostalgia of Beat writers like Kerouac. Many of the songs conjure up forgotten homes and vanished lovers, like Honey Boy and Sweet Blue. Sweet Blue‘s accompanying video epitomises the wistful tone of the album, with its shaky handheld footage of a 1950s couple crafting model aeroplanes and picking flowers. As a dimpled young woman in a sunhat peers out of a convertible, we can only imagine what she murmurs to the person behind the lens.
The band embrace a more sinister note in Mama I Have Sinned, a taut murder ballad bristling with bitterness and revenge. Scott-Samuel’s vocal masterfully handles the dramatic intensity of the song, veering between desperation and recklessness, almost edging towards a swagger as she declares “Mama if you don’t help me / They’re gonna hang, draw and quarter me”. Bitter Wind continues in this despairing vein, as its protagonists seek refuge in a hostile landscape, backed by eerie, tremolo guitars. The characters in Scott-Samuel’s songs are always on the move.
Sometimes, though, they get a break. Me and My Baby opens with a sprightly fiddle melody and vocal as crisp and refreshing as a mint julep on an idle June day. Carmensita depicts a fiery romantic heroine sailing fearlessly through thunderstorms. The Things I Love is an earnest celebration of nature, revelling in coral reefs, rainbows and animals with a simple childlike joy.
But in the end, hope feels hard-won. All This Time is the album’s send-off, lamenting the drudgery of daily life. “Toil and work your life away,” she sighs defeatedly, over intricate plucked guitar. It’s a malaise as familiar to the person breaking rocks in the Great Depression as the person taking minutes in an airless Old Hall Street meeting room. She’s In The Trees might lean towards an old-fashioned aesthetic, but they recognise that the toll life takes on the human spirit is timeless and universal.
“These songs were born out of a need for emotional order and clarity of mind – but also from a craving for reverie and escape,” Scott-Samuel has explained. Perhaps some demons were conquered in the writing process, but still these songs retain their restless mystique. This is an album hotfooting it from place to place, over mountains, ravines, rivers, suburban lawns and moonless deserts, but cursed never to outrun its own delicate, deep-seated melancholy. As McCullers put it herself, “We are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
Stream The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter now. Follow @shes.in.the.trees on Instagram for updates.
Orla Foster
