There have long been clear associations between poetry and song, but the connections between music and more long-form prose storytelling have been explored less often. An upcoming collaboration between author Tom Cox and Stick in the Wheel’s From Here Records makes the case for a closer relationship between the fields.
Cox has written on many subjects, from golf to musical subcultures to cats to the British landscape, but his 2018 book Help the Witch is a collection of charming and engrossing horror tales steeped in the tradition of the folk tale. “I’ve started to think more of my books as albums themselves, almost,” says Cox. “I feel like they all have the narrative that you get on an album where the actual order of the tracks is really important and they tell a story. People ask me ‘can you suggest a soundtrack, do you have a song for each chapter or each section?’ and when I was writing Help the Witch I thought, well, I could do that, but what if it was totally new music and people actually taking these stories as just a jumping-off point, and seeing where they could go?” So that’s exactly what he did.
Digging out his address book, Cox assembled ten artists from across the folk-psychedelic spectrum – including Gemma Khawaja, Jim Ghedi, and Dan Davies and Jack Sharp of Wolf People – to interpret, retell or reimagine each of the stories of Help the Witch from their own musical perspective. From Here Records stepped up to create the album itself, and they are now running a crowdfunding campaign to release it as a fancy gatefold LP.
Nicola Kearey of From Here Records and Stick in the Wheel (who naturally contribute their own piece to the compilation) sees this coming-together of different artistic realms as an exciting opportunity that is starting to gather steam. “Within the creative community these opportunities for cross-pollination are coming up and people suddenly are realising ‘oh, we can do all this stuff’ and actually it could involve more than one type of audience. You don’t just have record buyers and book lovers, often those people are the same person.”
It’s not just the audiences that are one and the same, either. Cox believes that the album itself is so successful in its aims because of the shared terroir between folk music and his own work. They’re connected by ancient tales and shared lands, echoed accurately in the contributing musicians’ offerings. “I feel like they understood the atmosphere of the book. They’re all people who read, they’re all people with a sense of the countryside, a sense of rural history, a sense of social history. I think that’s apparent in the way they approach the songs.”
With Kearey believing that “each makes the other a richer experience,” the pairing of folk album and fiction book is an unusual partnership, but one that could become more common in the near future. And what better place to start than one immersed in the creepier side of English folklore?