Factory Girl: Bridget Hayden and The Apparitions
"Bridget Hayden and the Apparitions start the year with traditional songs as heavy as the sodden moors at midnight. They unfurl at a glacial pace, with analogue synths and delicate banjos buoying up Hayden’s deep, measured voice." The Guardian 'Folk Album of the Month'
"Trad folk songs, hauntingly interpreted.... Hayden has pulled off one of the greatest renditions of them all." 9/10 Uncut 'Album of the Month'
"Ominous drones, clanking banjos, filthy weather: a winning combo." **** MOJO
"It’s an album as distinct and vivid as its characters are dark and illusory... like a meeting of June Tabor, Laura Cannell and Alison Cotton." KLOF
Bridget Hayden and The Apparitions
"Factory Girl"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3XeCc5KbQI
Taken from the album 'Cold Blows the Rain'
Released 10th January 2025 on Basin Rock
Album launch - 18th Jan @ Natural Endings, Todmorden
Bridget Hayden is an experimental musician, who invites the ghosts in for the classic folk songs that make up her stunning new album, Cold Blows the Rain, a new eight-song collection released via Basin Rock.
The songs that make up Cold Blows the Rain come wrapped in mist and coated with drizzle, those elements shaping the album as much as the voice and the instruments held within, as real but ambiguous as the ghosts that linger in the shadows. The sound of the dark valley floor in West Yorkshire where Bridget calls home.
“The weather speaks the most eloquently about human loss,” Bridget says. “It’s good to feel enveloped by something so much vaster than ourselves. The rain and the tears all become one.”
For all of her previous sonic exploration, so much of her work has been formed around elements of traditional folk aesthetics and, over time, she began to piece together a collection of reinterpreted traditional songs that she absorbed as a child from her mother: through The Dubliners and Muddy Waters, to Bessie Smith and The Leadbelly Songbook. Harvesting her love for Nina Simone, Karen Dalton, Margaret Barry, and more, Bridget takes these traditional songs and transforms them into something uniquely evocative
"It goes back to the womb,” Bridget says of that connection. “I would not call it a memory as it is so deep within my blood and bones. My mum was the source, she sang all the time, as part of life. So it was a very lulling and natural introduction. It seemed common to hear her singing – unbeknownst to her – in time with a raindrop dripping at the window,” Bridget continues. “I’ve always wanted to do a folk record as I love these songs so much. It comes much more naturally to me to sing other people’s words, especially when they’re as beautiful as these old verses.”
Pre-orders:
https://bridgethayden.bandcamp.com/album/cold-blows-the-rain
https://www.basinrock.co.uk/records/cold-blows-the-rain
