Hannah Sanders & Ben Savage - In The Dark We Grow

The duo’s fourth full-length album, In The Dark We Grow works with a more expansive musical canvas than 2022’s pared down Ink Of The Rosy Morning, featuring no fewer than, 11 guest musicians, Jess Morgan and Findlay Napier among them, alongside double bass player Jon Thorne. Dedicated to the late Northumbrian singer-songwriter and outstanding slide guitarist Johnny Dickinson, it includes the title track of his 2003 debut album Castles And Old Kings, a stripped back melancholic blues about a young boy who dreams of going to America, Savage’s vocal to the fore with Sanders on harmonies.

There’s one other cover, Sanders channelling the purity of both Sandy Denny and Mimi Fariña for the latter’s husband Richard’s now-staple Quiet Joys Of Brotherhood, set to the Irish air My Lagan Love, the slow walking arrangement built around acoustic guitar, brushed drums and dobro.

The rest is all either traditional arrangements or self-penned material, the album opening on drone with one of the former. Acoustic guitar accompanies Sanders singing Border Widow’s Lament, a 16th Scottish ballad believed to concern the execution of Cockburne of Henderland (beheaded in Edinburgh not, as popular report has it hanged over his own castle gate) in 1529.

First Footing, backed by organ and synths, from whence the album title comes, features Sanders on soaring lead. Another quietly ruminative number with electric guitar and a muted percussive under-rhythm that takes its title from the Scottish new year tradition and is a love song about facing the future together, the final verse conflating different Greek, Wican, Jewish and Buddhist superstitions.

One of six to feature a multitude of guests on vocal with Flynn Cohen adding mandolin, the slow walking The Youngest Sailor is, despite its traditional mien, a self-penned track. Sanders and Savage duet with Savage to the fore, on a song about rights of passage as, with its ’sail on’ refrain, our narrator sets out to prove himself worthy for the girl he leaves behind.

There’s two further original songs, the next up, being Save My Life, featuring Sanders on guitar, Savage on lead and duetting the “sing like a little wren” chorus. Another plaintive love song, even if the line “I’ll light you a match/And you can let it burn my hand” does feel a tad sado-masochistic!

The other is The Lilac Bloom, again with massed backing vocals, a number that very much sports spartan American folk colours (Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies comes to mind), and flows with more fire, storm, dreams, nature and rebirth imagery as it too travels an unknown road to an unknown future.

It’s followed by their final joint composition, the airy, dreamily melancholic instrumental The Lavender’s Ready, dulcimer and dobro again imparting an American folk mood. The two remaining numbers both being their arrangements of traditionals, the duo trading and sharing vocals on the bluegrass Say Darlin’ Say.

Savage’s vintage 1953 Gibson interlaced with mandolin and dulcimer and picking up speed as it goes with chuckling at the end, interpolates Hush Little Baby. The album ends, again alternating verses, with the wearily resigned Marbletown, not the Mark Knopfler number but a variation on the Appalachian folk song Every Night When The Sun Goes In, originally appearing in instrumental form on 2018’s Awake. In the dark they grow, in the light they shine.