A beautiful, passionate, poetic new single of evocative, soaring chamber pop by the British singer-songwriter inspired by three years of walks and researching the history and psychogeography of the White Cliffs of Dover near near his home in east Kent. He explores the romantic mythologising aspect of Alice Duer Miller’s verse novel The White Cliffs, as well as referring to the famous wartime anthem, and taking a look at how Dover has relentlessly exploited as the centre of ‘crisis’ after ‘crisis’ within the British media. Having struggled with mental health issues over the years, it’s an important personal piece of work. “Ultimately it became a song that accepts, as I have at my age, that we can only learn how to live alongside our sorrows in order to be temporarily free of them, arriving and departing, temporarily obscuring our path and vision in the hymn of the passing mist of cloud, the sea fret, the haar. It was with this song I began to make out a relationship between Crying the Neck and my second album Wind in the Wires, where at 21 I was fighting to be free by being free of my sorrows but 20 years later I finally achieved that freedom in the acceptance of living alongside them. The final line is taken from a 10th Century poem written in Old English called ‘The Wanderer’: ‘Oft him anhaga are gebideð’ translating to ‘Often the solitary one finds mercy’.”
Hymn of the Haar heralds his forthcoming new album, Crying The Neck, out on 13 June via Apport / Virgin Music. Dies Irae and Limbo are other recently released singles. To explore and enjoy more by Patrick Wolf, see also the other embedded links below.
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