From the new album "A Dark Murmuration of Words" - https://smarturl.it/eb-words

“It’s a matter of life and death for this country. The Kenyan forests are facing extinction and it is a man-made problem.” Wangari Maathai
 
Kenyan activist, Wangari Maathai founded The Green Belt Movement in order to reforest degraded land to provide food and empower women in her community. Since its establishment in 1977, over fifty million trees have been planted in the region, and over thirty thousand women trained in forestry, food processing, beekeeping and other trades that provide an income as well as protect and nurture the environment.

In 2004 Professor Maathai became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize which was awarded for her “contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace". Though she passed away at the age of 71 in 2011, her legacy lives on with seeds and saplings planted years ago now towering as mature trees above the people in the community.

I saw a short documentary about her which included interviews with her daughter, Wanjira Mathai, as she walked through the beautiful forests planted by her mother and friends. In the desperate context of our times, we can look to people such as Wangari Maathai and The Green Belt Movement for inspiration, knowledge and instruction.

A Dark Murmuration of Words

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The Woman Who Planted Trees

From the new album "A Dark Murmuration of Words" - https://smarturl.it/eb-words

“The longer I have stayed in England, the more numerous and powerful my memories of Sydney have grown.” Clive James. 

 
A few years ago, my parents sold our family home and moved from the riverside block into town to make an easier life for themselves. Although the move made sense for where they were up to in their lives, it was not a decision that was made lightly given how long we’d spent being just a few steps away from toes in the water of the Blackwood River.

There are so many memories held in that land: the shade-giving eucalypts we’d seen grow over the years; the cleared path through the bush to our private swimming spot; the saplings planted on the river banks; the pets buried in the garden; my grandmother’s ashes scattered beneath the Japanese maple. I knew I would miss it dearly but on returning to Bridgetown and my parents’ new home, I realised that mostly it was the people that I depended on for affirming my sense of self and place in the world. 

My foundation of memories rooted to place runs deep, supporting an unyielding and complex love that continues to serve as muse for me as I write words and melodies of adoration and longing from far away.

Geography

From the new album "A Dark Murmuration of Words" - https://smarturl.it/eb-words

Solastalgia (/ˌsɒləˈstældʒə/) is a neologism that describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change.

There was a watershed moment in 2019 when the critical degree to which we’ve ravaged our planet broke through into public consciousness. My immediate response was the feeling that I needed to go ‘home’ – I needed to be beside my family, to know they were safe, to make up for all the years I’ve spent away from them. I needed to be in the first landscape I ever loved: the Blackwood River (Gigellup buerle in the Noongar tongue) that runs through the deep hills of Bridgetown and past my view looking out the window of our family home in the south west of Australia. I needed to know that it too was safe.

The feeling wasn’t just physical, it was also temporal – ‘home’ meant being drawn back to my childhood: naïve and splashing in the river after school on hot, summer afternoons where crickets clicked a casual tempo and life felt immortal.

I started to ask myself whether or not the path I am on – the one I’ve been on for many years – is still the right one in light of the sombre and overwhelming revelation that our earth is very sick. Whether the journey is leading me where I want to go, whether I still have hold of the reins, whether it is time at last to return to my first home – a question that seems to have no answer, despite the number of songs I have dedicated to it.

Return Me

From the new album "A Dark Murmuration of Words" - https://smarturl.it/eb-words

“Whatever it is, if it’s affecting the sparrows, is it doing us any good? I think of the miner’s canary.” Dr Denis Summers-Smith

There are sparrows in the eaves above my bedroom window in Stroud, Gloucestershire. The window has a view above our tiny terrace garden and stretches out over one of the five valleys. In the mornings I enjoy sitting in the window bench seat, watching the sparrows dart from the eaves above me to the seed balls below. They are a common bird in this old part of town where the walls are made of Cotswold stone and the roofs of slate tiles – allowing for plenty of nesting places unlike newer, more sealed-up builds.

The song title came from some words I saw on an environmental campaign poster. It called to mind an old folk song by Pete Seeger ‘Where Have all the Flowers Gone?’ but also got me wondering if, despite the abundance of sparrows in my own town, their numbers were actually diminishing. I looked into it and found that over the last few decades the sparrow has gone from being one of the world’s most common and widespread birds to being Red Listed as a species of high conservation concern – in the UK alone, numbers in rural areas  have halved since the 1970s, whilst in towns and cities they have declined by 60%.

My thoughts returned to the sparrows outside my window - how sad it would be to look out and not see and hear their vibrant movement and chatter. I hope that day never comes.

'Where Have The Sparrows Gone?' is set in an apocalyptic future London, where sparrows were once as common as pigeons, and follows a mother and daughter as they flee the capital, now devoid of sparrows and the trees that were once their home.

Where Have The Sparrows Gone

From the new album "A Dark Murmuration of Words" - https://smarturl.it/eb-words

"neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Amendment XIII, 1865

I try to stay healthy when I’m on tour and find that jogging serves two purposes - it keeps me fit and it allows me to experience the cities I visit and learn a little more about them than I would from the inside of a hotel room. On one such tour stop, I found myself on a run along the Charleston harbour front, past parks where large, foreboding statues celebrate the slave merchants of the nineteenth century. This is not unique to Charleston (historically the largest slave port in the United States) –   where I grew up in Western Australia, similarly austere statues commemorate the colonial land owners, responsible for decimating local indigenous peoples. 

Ava DuVernay’s powerful documentary 13th explores the loophole in the US Constitution’s Thirteenth Amendment - the intention of the amendment was to abolish slavery and involuntary servitude, but there’s a catch: “except as a punishment for a crime…"

Starting with the notorious Black Codes, decades of systematic criminalisation of African Americans followed, enabling the continuation of forced labour that carries on today as the wheels keep turning and sophistically evolving structural racism ensures the continued privilege of whiteness.

To this day, global corporations continue to benefit from cheap labour from the system of penal servitude. Funny how the same machine that perpetuates slavery in America also perpetuates the abuse of the planet.

Machine

From the new album "A Dark Murmuration of Words" - https://smarturl.it/eb-words

A mother sings to her unborn child... she sings of a world that is not in the state she hoped it would be upon her child’s arrival, but that she and her partner will do all they can to nurture and care for their child in these times of strange weather and struggle brought about by climate change.

One line in the song – "The peace of wild things” – is borrowed from a book of poetry with the same title by Wendell Berry in which he celebrates the power, beauty and grounding abilities of our natural world. I often have moments of nostalgia for those times as a child when the Blackwood River, a forest, the ocean, a mountain, gave me a sense of peace and perspective and I feel such sadness for the children who may not be able to enjoy this primal feeling.

The song asks for the forgiveness of future generations for the ignorance and excess that has steered humanity for far too long and hopes that, for their sake, we may learn to right our wrongs, to change for the better.

Strange Weather

From the new album "A Dark Murmuration of Words" - https://smarturl.it/eb-words

I grew up in a place where if you looked up at the night sky, you could see stars between stars between stars. I remember being overwhelmed by the feeling of how I was just a tiny dot in time and space. Yet somehow it seemed to make sense. It was also, simply, breathtakingly beautiful.

We are made out of the same stuff as stars: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur. Perhaps this partially explains why the feeling of connection to everything, to everyone, comes when we look up at a starry sky.

Touring as a musician, travelling from one city to the next, night after night, it is easy to feel disoriented, disconnected. I remember one particular night in Los Angeles yearning to see the stars in order to feel less alone and more connected to my family and close friends, and to my past as a country girl in Western Australia. But this was LA, with no stars to be seen. Even so, I felt somehow comforted by knowing they were there, albeit veiled behind a curtain of light pollution and smog. I thought of my four year old niece and imagined her as a young woman travelling like myself, feeling homesick for our first landscape by the Blackwood River and for her family. In many ways, this song is a letter to her. But it is also for me: a reminder of connection to those gone before us, to the present and the future; and to the sobering insignificance of the individual in light of the magnificent, recondite whole.

When Stars Cannot Be Found

From the new album "A Dark Murmuration of Words" - https://smarturl.it/eb-words

I am a huge fan of West Australian author Tim Winton. This is not the first song I have written after reading one of his novels – my song ‘Disappear’ was written after reading his novel Dirt Music and included on my Despite the Snow album.

‘Ordinary’ was written after reading Breath. Like many of Winton’s novels, Breath is set in rural, coastal Western Australia and depicts the melancholy, ennui and apathy that bubbles under the surface of small-town life – especially prevalent in teenagers. The story follows the friendship of two such teenage boys as they transition to adulthood, connected by their passion for surfing. The way in which Winton describes the West Australian coastline ignites my own childhood memories: wandering a pearl white shore, looking out at an imposing sea with that primal feeling of being put in your place by the magnitude of the ocean. It explores heroism on a grand scale (surfing giant waves in Indonesia) versus the beauty of the day-to-day in which the ordinary is celebrated (smaller, safer, long peeler waves).

Reading this novel in the context of our climate crisis, it feels like a metaphor; a reminder to explore and cherish the small mysteries and beauties hidden in plain sight on our own doorsteps.

Ordinary

From the new album "A Dark Murmuration of Words" - https://smarturl.it/eb-words

We are losing species at an alarming rate. I just got back from Australia where nearly half a billion animals died in the devastating forest fires. Many of the birds I grew up with in the South West of Australia like the Red-Tailed Black Cockatoo – Ngoolyark in Noongar language – are now on the endangered list. It is heart-wrenchingly sad – a complex grief that comes entangled with a huge dose of guilt.

I wrote this as a breakup song, but not about two parting lovers – it’s actually about my romance with our earth and all her species. It’s a plea for her, and them, to stay with me, to not let me go – and a promise to do all I can to make the relationship work.

 
An excerpt from Wendell Berry’s poem ‘The Peace of Wild Things’:

 
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

Any More Goodbyes

From the new album "A Dark Murmuration of Words" - https://smarturl.it/eb-words

This song wrote itself. One of those rare occasions that writers live for when words and music come pouring out and it’s a scramble to catch them as they do. I can liken it to seeing  something in your peripheral vision – when you look at it directly, it disappears.

Reading back through the lyrics after having scrawled them down in about half an hour, it became very clear to me what I was writing about and it sounds pompous to say, but it feels irreverent to the spirit of creativity to share much more about it. Suffice to say, I was subconsciously thinking about the interconnectedness of life and of historical repetitions - same stories, different clothes – wondering if we will ever learn from our mistakes.

Sonogram

Machine EP

"an album of spare, striking beauty" Mojo ★★★★
“...a kind of Australian equivalent of PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake” UNCUT 8/10

Produced by Greg Freeman (Portico Quartet, Peter Gabriel, Amy Winehouse) and recorded at StudiOwz, a converted chapel in the Welsh countryside, A Dark Murmuration of Words takes Barker’s clear, expressive vocals and warm acoustic aesthetic and subtly shifts her sound in the direction of contemporaries such as Laura Marling and Phoebe Bridgers. Lyrically probing, by turns both dark and optimistic, Barker searches for meaning through the deafening clamour of fake news and algorithmically filtered conversation, delivering a timely exploration of the grand themes of our age through the lens of what it means to return “home.”

Alluding to the album’s title, Barker references American writer Emily Dickinson: “ ‘If you take care of the small things, the big things take care of themselves’ – like the starlings in a murmuration, where the movement of each individual bird is related to just seven of its closest neighbours, none of them aware of the mesmerising, fluctuating patterns being created by the flock.” 

Throughout the ten songs that make up the album, Barker draws connections between the familial, the local, and the global: a mother sings to her unborn child, asking for its forgiveness on ‘Strange Weather’; ‘When Stars Cannot Be Found’ explores the humbleness and comfort of the night sky when far away from home. Other highlights include the nostalgic ‘Return Me’, the gloriously defiant ‘Machine’ and the effortless album closer ‘Sonogram’.

Emily Barker

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