Name: Vanessa's Song by PaulaWolfe
Duration: 3 min 47 s
Description: 'Vanessa's Song' from the re-worked album Staring (released 4th October 2024 on Sib Records)

The anecdote of Virginie Lacour-Puiboube finding  some old photographs and a recording of her grandmother's voice on a shellac disc. The narrator addresses the character telling her story, that of an extraordinary woman who was a radio announcer during WW2, flew planes, played piano and poker (and decided to take her daughter round the World for a long journey after WW2, but that is told in a different song).

This single version features a guitar solo by Neil McBennett while the album version features a solo by Paul Higgs on trumpet. 
 
The vinyl album "Voice on Shellac" is due for release on 13th April 2022.

Voice on Shellac (single version)

Voice On Shellac (Single Version)

'Vanessa's Song' from the re-worked album Staring (released 4th October 2024 on Sib Records)

Vanessa's Song

A triple release from Paula Wolfe, sees her work as fresh and as relevant as ever.

This summer and autumn sees a triple release from Paula Wolfe, comprising of a complete reworking of her first self-produced EP Find (Sib Records 2000), her debut album Staring (Sib Records 2003) and a remaster of her highly acclaimed second album Lemon (Sib Records 2008). 

You might well ask, why would anyone re-work their early releases? Shortly following the release of her third album ‘White Dots’ (Sib Records 2019), hailed ‘exquisite’, ‘glorious’ and ‘addictive’ (* * * * MOJO), which saw ‘The multi-hyphenate in excellent form’ (Folking.com) and compared to many of our greats (Travellers Tunes), she had her early recordings remastered with the intention that the full catalogue be re-issued before the fourth album.
However, she couldn’t access the original files. Part of that first generation of female artists who, in the late 1990s, embraced the arrival of digital recording software to find their own voices and develop their own sound, she had recorded the first two records onto disc on a digital 8 track using an early version of the software Cakewalk. Attempts to remaster from the CDs were unsuccessful, so she decided to re-record all the songs.

What then started out as a ‘straightforward’ re-recording, soon morphed into a complete reworking. Although it took far longer than envisaged, it developed into an insightful, important period of work, with Paula publishing a paper about the very creative and technical processes that have come to define her work as a self-producing singer-songwriter.

Somewhat ironically, the title track of the EP Find is actually about songwriting itself - or rather - the pull at the end of the summer to return ‘home’ to the craft. Many of the songs on those first two records, though, are stories based on her time living in Manchester in the north-west of England throughout the 1990s. An era of hardship for many, her characters often find themselves on the edges, living out their marginalisation. They also speak of her own troubled loves from that time, thus combining storytelling, a key feature of Wolfe’s later work, along with the confessional. What is striking is that these songs, based on particular events, from a particular time in a particular place, feel compellingly relevant.

An example from the EP is ‘Poolside’, a faithful account of a scene witnessed around a hotel swimming pool in Crete, where glaring inequalities are marked by two young women of a similar age, doing exactly the same thing - sunbathing - in exactly the same place but in drastically different circumstances. On one side of the pool a young female Russian sex worker is ‘selling her skin’ with a client sitting beside her ‘flicking through a porno magazine’. On the other, a young British woman is ‘reading The Times that Daddy somehow managed to find. Only 23 but she’s doing very well at the BBC’.

This sets the tone for the debut album that followed. The title track ‘Staring’ is a biting critique of the entitled sharp-elbows of the privileged, ensuring ‘a narrow-eyed determined stride past those who might be better than you’. In contrast, her depiction of the everyday lives of young people, on the other side of the track, details living out the tedium of underprivilege and poverty, drawing on her experiences at this time from her then-day job of teaching English in some of the most deprived areas of the North West.

‘Joy’ sees a disaffected joyrider trying to goad his friend into joining him on a spree, ‘what d’you mean you want something better, this is it for lads like you and me’. ‘Skinny’ presents a pale young girl ‘hanging round on the corner’, bored with her gossiping friends, living an inward life, avoiding the scary local gang and being hungry. ‘Leanne’ charts the challenges of a school day for a troubled little girl who ‘hides her head in her jumper when she’s sad’ and Oldham Street witnesses the streets, of late 1990s Manchester, turn dark and wild at chucking out time.

As dark as some of these stories are, Wolfe’s production, on the other hand is upbeat with the songs benefiting from her new string, brass and woodwind arrangements performed by a small team of local session players she recorded in her house, while she provides all the guitars, the bass (which she taught herself to play as part of the project), the synths and beats and, of course, her signature vocals.

There are songs also about love. Although romantic love, in all its guises, is most represented in pop songs, the EP includes the ‘Coolest Kind of Love’, a celebration of the love between sisters. A brighter note can be seen also on the album in ‘Wind’ where momentary blissful love is felt when watching, with her then-partner, a spectacular summer storm on a beach, feelings all the more urgent for their transitoriness, ‘you were never quite as beautiful as you are today’, she sings, ‘let me keep this feeling, just for a day.’

Having garnered widespread praise throughout her career for ‘hitting the mark on both sides of the desk’ (Fatea Magazine), this project sees Paula’s skills as composer, arranger, producer and mix engineer, in addition to those as a songwriter, musician and singer, ever evolving as a self-producing artist, demonstrating that the plaudits remain as well deserved as ever.

It’s worth noting that following those early recordings, Paula has also developed a significant side hustle as a leading academic with an international profile in music production and gender. Her award nominated book Women in the Studio (Routledge 2020), was published alongside the release of the third album and, since its publication, has become embedded in the curriculum in degree programmes worldwide, supported by guest lectures and talks from Paula at over 40 universities within the UK, Europe, Canada and the US.

This reworking project, therefore, has seen Paula developing a new area of practice research with her latest publication forming the blueprint of her new book on self-production, a practice, that she has long argued is an art form, distinct within music production, and which continues to offer creative empowerment for those artists marginalised by their gender, their colour and their class.

A singular artist and academic, Paula Wolfe continues to forge her own path, shaping the discourse that follows.

FIND (re-worked EP) OUT NOW: 'Extraordinary' 'Psychedelic' 'Beautiful'
'Poetic' 9/10 IndustryMe.com
Joy (single) OUT NOW
STARING (re-worked album) OUT NOW
LEMON (remaster) OUT 29.11.2024

Vanessa's Song

PaulaWolfe

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