Marry Waterson and Adrian Crowley: 'It’s almost like a conversation sometimes'

“I took a photograph of the street scene in front of me and shared it with a note to say what I was listening to and then I just continued on my way and didn’t think of it again, but it was, I suppose, just an act of positivity, reaching out to the ether,” he says.

Over in North Yorkshire, Waterson, who is part of a famous folk music dynasty that includes her mother Lal and cousin Eliza Carthy and has a background as a “serial collaborator”, picked up the “lovely” post and was intrigued. She says: “I recalled that he’d worked with a friend who I’d collaborated with, James Yorkston, so I had a listen to some of Adrian’s music, then I messaged him to say I love a project, if you ever fancy having a go on something do send me something and he replied, ‘I’d absolutely love that’. So a social media post brought that about.”

As the pair emailed back and forth, their “creative roles exchanged fluidly as lyric and/or melody writer”, says Waterson. “I’d sang on a song that he sent, Watching the Starlings, and I instinctively sang in hushed tones and lullaby la-las not to break the spell of the story that he was casting, and at the end of that I thought I really like the intimacy of our voices together. Quite often it’s nice to have an alto and a soprano or whatever but here the lower register appealed.”

In the end Crowley wrote four songs, and Waterson four, while the remaining three tracks on the album were penned together. “There were period where we had to pause as things happened in life, then we’d pick it up again a few weeks or even a couple of months down the line,” Crowley says. “We didn’t have a pre-set idea of who would do what or where the songs would come from and it was lovely.

“One of my favourite things about the whole process was I often think about it as like receiving a lovingly-wrapped parcel in the post...One day I was walking along the seafront and I had sent Marry lyrics for The Leviathan and the very next day I was walking along the same part of the street and she sent me a voice memo of her singing those lyrics. It was very exciting and a very different way from working alone.”

The lyric to One Foot of Silver, One Foot of Gold was written by Waterson’s mother Lal, who had been part of the famous folk group The Watersons in the 1960s. It was dedicated to the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, often described as the writer Lal most admired. Marry admits to feeling a close connection to her mother while she was composing the tune.

“The lyrics are completely hers, I wrote a melody,” she says. “I was aware that mum was totally in love with Rimbaud and she’d written several things and done several paintings, she really liked him as a writer. They didn’t make their way into a song for some reason or other, but what amazing lines, so I thought I would do a melody, they’re too good to waste sort of thing.

“I was recording it and this garden bird came and sat on the window and it just came to mind that it could be mum. I was just sitting there thing, what are you doing and I couldn’t finish the rest of the song. I’m really interested in augury, that’s something that I intend to write about at some point. Adrian was knocked out by it, he desperately wanted to sing on it as well.”

Waterson, who cannot play an instrument, found it useful having Crowley’s skills as a player and arranger. “I love to do that,” he says, pointing out the array of instruments in his home studio that include a piano, Mellotron, saxophone, clarinet, guitars, marxophone, trumpet, viola and harmonium. “There are effects pedals, things to create ambience. All of those things I would make recordings of here and run it by Marry and discuss the feel of songs, the pace. Sometimes we re-did a song to see what rhythm it needed to drive the narrative.”

The album’s unhurried feel and sense of space between the two singers “just grew organically”, Waterson feels. “I always get back to that idea of space,” says Crowley. “Especially as the lover of words that I am, I always feel that words need space around them to fully vibrate, to fully capture the essence of the combination of the lines of the song. I don’t think they come across if there’s too much around them. I like the idea even of incremental space where it’s as if a word has just fallen there. I think the way we resonated with songs it’s almost like a conversation sometimes, when you’re talking to someone you need a bit of a pause between the words to take things in, I think it’s the same with words in songs and notes in music.”

Although they only met in person two days before they went into the studio in Bristol with producer Jim Barr, they found they got on well. Crowley says: “I was thinking about the weeks ahead, the work we had to do. I wasn’t worried about us finally meeting, I just saw it as part of our experience. Maybe I’m just a positive thinker anyway...I’d already felt how it was going to be and definitely it was a part of the whole dynamic of working in the studio...Maybe there was a little bit of an edge at the start.”

Waterson’s commitments to caring for her husband, who has cancer, and a smattering of dates with the Hack-Poets Guild have so far prevented them from arranging concerts together, but Crowley hopes they will eventually find time to perform Cuckoo Storm live.

In the meantime, he says: “I love the idea of the album reaching people either immediately or gradually. I want it to be in people’s lives and I want them to absorb the songs, and I want people to wonder when they will get to see us play. If it’s not going to happen immediately so be it, but I want people to have the music and when the time come I’m sure we’ll get to play onstage. At that stage people will know all the lyrics off by heart.”

Cuckoo Storm is out on One Little Independent on March 8.