Hailing from the North East but now Birmingham-based after graduating from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in June 2022, while jazz-folk singer-songwriter LUCY MELLENFIELD had a mini-album, In My Short Time, back in 2020, Tell The Water, She Will Listen, released on Birmingham’s Stoney Lane Records, is her full length debut. Drawing on themes of fragility, love, loss and the turmoil of society, she plays grand piano, upright piano, Rhodes, keyboards, synths and acoustic guitar with accompaniment from Tom Henery on guitars, Alex Collett-Sinfield on sax, mandolin, kalimba and flute, bassist Josh Vadiveloo, drummer Jonno Gaze and producer Chris Hyson on synths.
Described as a musical snapshot of the last five years, she says it draws on how, in her early twenties, she’s faced fears, battled with relationships, fell in love, saw loved ones suffer, revisited childhood trauma, experienced health scares, and raised questions about the frightening society we live in, with music, the water of the title, being her support system and means of communication.
Striking a theme of fragility from the start, it opens with the hushed piano-based Like A Feather, a lightly fluttering song about coping with family conflict, divorce and being pushed to choose sides as she sings “What team am I on?...I’m walking along the wire…Talk to my brother/He’s just another one caught in the game”.
That’s followed with the watery rippling Fact Of Life, the arrangement becoming fuller with drums, keys and brass, her soaring voice intimate and exposed, conjuring a mood reminiscent of a cocktail that stirs together Tanita Tikaram, Jacquie McShee and perhaps even Kate Bush, as she addresses relationship uncertainty and the need for clarity (“Am I a fact in your life?/Or am I just a passing fancy hoping that I’m yours/I will be okay if it comes to that/So please don’t be afraid to tell me how it is”).
With pensive repeated guitar notes and an uneasy brooding atmosphere against which her quivering and clear voice floats like the vocal equivalent of Millais’s Ophelia, Paper Thin goes to the heart of an unpredictable, agonising love affair with themes of dependency, instability (“I’m on the brink of flying away in pieces/My cards aren’t glued
They’re loose, loose as stacked sticks/One little nudge and they’ll come crashing down”) and, again, the torment of uncertainty (“Will you be here tomorrow like you were today?
…your charms, they’re so intangible/Just like paper slipping through my fingers/I lay myself out for you/A soft bed of flowers where you can rest your head/But when I open my eyes, all I see is a bed for one/Instead of two”).
One of only three tracks that clock in under five minutes, the fingerpicked Yellow Duck begins with the image of a lonesome yellow duck wading through a pond at night, the song evolving with nervy piano notes into a reflection of a young woman trying to find a solid rock amid life’s turbulent waters (“no one to confide in/Put up a wall, defence is her strength/Swallowing blindly everything that is left/The lights go out on this once lit fun fair/Push and a pull, pull and a push/A mother’s attention and a mother’s curse/Rippling, wallowing, shattering, scattering/Clinging on… Floating around/These days never feel like walking on solid ground”).
Again under five minutes, etched on hesitant piano notes, Orange and Lemons is a more upbeat love song (“Each kiss was just another moment’s bliss/Looking over the hillside, there was no doubt in my mind…Now let me wonder how a face as pure as yours/Ended up in my bed next to me…You made me smile like I’ve never smiled before…It was your voice that melted my heart/That now runs free through the valleys to nowhere”).
The first of six that push beyond seven minutes, riding a jittery pulsing rhythm the slow jazz grooved Remember This reflects back on childhood with “homely smells of corned beef stew/Hand cut, crinkled chips fresh from the pan/Kippers and some buttered bread on a Sunday” and how “she would stand in front of the mirror/In her cream white coat and bag stuck to her side/Perfecting her bright red smile/Before jumping into the car and racing me down the hill”), switching parents (“Perched on the arm of his chair/He would tell me I’m solid; what a thing to say/But he’d teach me to take pride in my words/And read me tales like the Selfish Giant”) before the present makes its stark presence felt (“let me take your old frail hands/For you deserve the world, but age takes its toll… how I wish I could take you out for a dance and a bitter lemon/See you sit down at the bar/And entertain the crowd with your um cha cha”), poignantly closing with “You let me see that love was true…Sparked a moment in my heart/That hangs like a piece of art today…Can you hear my prayers to you now?”
Only slightly shorter, another ruminative piano ballad, Ground Zero returns to feelings of being emotionally untethered (“all the faith I had has begun to dissipate”), both defiantly self-reliant and vulnerable (“I can walk on my own two feet, but I need somebody to join me through the folds/I’ve chosen a lonely road/A path away from home/I can’t escape now/Just got to wait for the snow”) as the poetic takes hold as she sings “fear grows like ivy on a house in disarray/Send me a sign…Feels like Christmas morning/Sipping chocolate on a carpet ride/Oh, but watch out for the white bear/He is known to tantalize/Feeding off your wonder/Dancing rings around your eyes”).
Edging close to ten minutes with glacial piano and haunted woodwind and brass notes conjuring a wintery nocturne feel, Why Fear The Night with its lengthy instrumental play out is steeped in nature imagery as it explores the world of dreams and the imagination (“Earth’s witchcraft begins work for tonight…Once the world is sleeping a young girl stirs/A strange sound seems to have awakened her/So she turns on her reading lamp and takes a glimpse outside/A fox’s eyes meet hers”). She urges “prepare to take flight/let go of your pillow/Creatures crawl out from their lair/Mysterious insects flitting in and out of the glare…Senses now aroused, the young girl takes a chance/Her night lamp by her side, she leaps outside to dance/She swoops below the moon who unveils her pretty face/And prances over roof tops, singing sounds of love and grace/let go and fly”.
Equally minimalistic and atmospheric, her voice, at times wordless, flowing across the scales, the languid, sax-caressed Breathing Sideways turns to social commentary (“Truth has no place here no more/Doubting our own kind…Some of us find it hard to stop the train/That we’ve found ourselves captive on/Caught on a trembling jet stream/That opens up a world of grave uncertainty”), a world where “Invisible warfare is everywhere…And all these stories, they give reason to doubt/And all these lies, they just give reason to shout”) but which has become the norm in which we live.
It heads to a close with the sparse piano arrangement of Pillars with its thematic echoes of seeking safety in conformity (“If you dare stand out to face the rain/You will only find yourself in pain…I thought I was strong/Thought that I could speak my mind about what I believe in/Turns out I was wrong/I rely on numbers and agreement of others/But turns out that most of us do”). Singing “I urge to speak but all my reasoning is dried up from the dust of doubtful winds/And every pore is left to dry, left to quench the water denied to me”, it’s about trying to sort the truth from the clouds that obscure, rising to take on progressive rock colours as it concludes “Thoughts like iron bars are cast upon me…
Some plucked from the air and some are rooted in the soil/But if we don’t know which is which/We’ll believe none”) before the dying fade of the piano.
It ends with the two part combined 11 minutes plus At The Mercy, part I with sparse resonant bass notes and narcotic vocals and stream of consciousness lyrics (“Visceral reactions, responses, internal fights/Intrinsic fears like stabbing spears forging their way through/Psychological patterns, a web of intricate insecurities/Non-sensical, irrational, delusional/But human”) as, in a fight or flight, reaction she withdraws into herself (“I lay battered, overwhelmed/Lost, scared/Vulnerable to the unexplainable/Vulnerable to the unattainable/It’s a reminder of this living vessel I am occupying”). It feels like an existential prayer to the elements find sense among the noise and chaos that afflict us emotionally, physically and psychologically, the lengthier part II pared down to just the barest instrumentation and the repeated otherworldly lines “We hold our hands up/We’re at the mercy of our insides” before it rises to a climactic swell.
A musically masterfully crafted poetic and at times metaphysical journey into and exploration of the complex emotional synapses that shape our anxieties, needs and hopes in an ever shifting world of relationships and psychological pulls, this is a stunning and immersive piece of work that deserves to see her follow Katherine Priddy as the next Birmingham sensation.
Talking of whom, her third and final single from the upcoming These Frightening Machines album, Hurricane (Cooking Vinyl) sees her spreading her musical wings for a very sultry, bossa nova flavoured track with Bond theme undertones that features Ben Christophers on electric guitar, bass. piano and organ with Simon Dobson on trumpet.
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