Fresh Squeezed: Caroline Weeks

"My candle burns at both ends/It will not last the night/But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends/It gives a lovely light!" - Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote in a lyrical voice, and it was only a matter of time before someone put her words to music. London's soaring soprano Caroline Weeks (Bats For Lashes) has managed to record a moving tribute to Millay that is intelligent in both lyric and sound. The album Songs for Edna, features 9 tracks of stark minimal folk all with lyrics borrowed from the late American poet. Caroline gives every word it proper tribute and showcases it all with her flare and grace on the Spanish guitar. A classically trained flautist and effortlessly self-taught multi-instrumentalist, Caroline currently prefers a three-quarter-sized classical Spanish guitar, which she uses to brew a heady mix of cantering finger picks and delicately decaying sound shapes, where the spaces are just as important as the notes.

Add to this her own "secret" tuning (which has been known to flummox even the most competent of guitarists looking to have a quick strum in the Green Room) and you have a truly original sound. The sound she has found is haunting, but inviting, distant yet warm enough to grab your attention instantly. She has this tangible sense of power hidden below her fragile voice much like Millay's power that hid beneath her delicate verse.

Songs for Edna (Manimal Vinyl, April 07, 2009)
See Where Capella with her golden kids/What lips my lips have kissed/Wild Swans/ Renascence/ Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave/The return/Pity me not/I shall go back/ Elegy (mp3)