Natalie Wildgoose: 'I'm particularly inspired by that desolate nature on the moors'

Rural Hours is a project that she’d been “wanting to make for quite a few years”, she says, with her mother’s side of the family hailing from around Ilkley and the Yorkshire Dales.

“When I moved back to the Yorkshire Dales six years ago I’d been recording in this village hall, which is where the piano is that I write most of my stuff on, and after my grandad passed away I inherited this tape machine, which I was playing around with. And the tape machine and the space was really creating this world that took the songs I’d written and made them into something more important for me.

“Whilst I was living there as well, the area was changing a lot, places were being sold, we lost the local school recently and the shop has just closed down as well in the village, so I wanted to capture some of these spaces before were sold off or some of them had gone into abandonment, and I got some funding from the PRS Women Make Music fund, which was amazing. They basically paid for me to bring up musicians, I tried to get Yorkshire-based musicians to come and collaborate on the record.”

Each of the six songs was written and recorded in the space that Wildgoose had chosen. “So each one has a different place...then when we did the recording it made these amazing experiences. I invited Owen Spafford and Chris Brain to come to a bothy about a two-and-a-half hour walk up from the nearest village, there was no water and there was no electricity. When we were walking there, Owen pointed to a barn without a roof full of sheep and asked ‘is that it?’ I said no, but they had to put a lot of trust in me because we did it in November, which was painful but beautiful.

“We brought a fire and I had quite a lot of camping stuff so I made a big soup and we cooked it on the camping stove and we had battery power for the recording equipment and spent the whole day. I remember leaving the room sometimes and hearing the music coming from inside this bothy and wondering if it’s ever had folk music played in there, and that it felt so right to bring it back there.”

By recording in this way, “it created all these different stories that came along with it,” she says. A lot of the groundwork had been laid by her own research. “I do a lot of drawings and sketches and photography. The space is so important to me, so there are other things that come along with it. I collect a lot of stuff from those spaces that helps me remember when I’m writing about them. So it’s come over a few years and I still have some that I didn’t record in but I’ve written a lot about and that I would like to (revisit) at some point maybe.”

Wildgoose takes a lot of her inspiration from the natural world. “Particularly that desolate nature on the moors,” she says. “That type of nature for me is something I’ve known since I was a kid and is where I feel most at home. It just feels that part of me is supposed to be there, so it definitely feeds into that creativity.”

Folk music traditions are very much in Wildgoose’s roots. “My grandfather was a piano player and his mother was a folk singer and I was given these books of Hebridean folk songs, they’re huge old things and they’re beautiful. As a child I would sing with my grandad but I never really loved singing (songs from those books) at the time, to be honest, but it was more like doing soemthing nice for grandad. I listen to all types of music, I studied jazz at a conservatory in London and I love listening to classical music and all sorts. I think that folk music for me maybe felt like I’d found a place that sat right. Maybe it’ll change, but I think with Yorkshire and the feeling that I get when I’m there, it feels the best form to write music in for my voice.”

After the festival season, Wildgoose plans to “disappear and doing some writing for a few months”.

“I’m a bit of a homebird,” she says. “I want to spend some time there and she what comes.”

Natalie Wildgoose plays at Deer Shed Festival, which runs from July 24-26. www.deershedfestival.com