Songs (Spiers and Boden album)

Songs
Studio album by Spiers and Boden
Released	2005
Genre	Folk
Length	47:26
Label	Fellside Recordings
Producer	Jon Boden, John Spires and Ben Ivitsky
Spiers and Boden chronology

Last updated February 23, 2019

Songs is an album by Spiers and Boden. It consists of traditional British folk songs and sea shanties, apart from Innocent When you Dream which was written by Tom Waits for the soundtrack to the film "Franks Wild Years". It was released less than six months after their previous album Tunes . Four of these songs concern murder, which gives a dark tone to the album. It was recorded and released in October 2005.

Spiers and Boden were an English folk duo. John Spiers plays melodeon and concertina, while Jon Boden sings and plays fiddle and guitar while stamping the rhythm on a stomp box.

The United Kingdom, officially the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland but more commonly known as the UK or Britain, is a sovereign country lying off the north-western coast of the European mainland. The United Kingdom includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland and many smaller islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom that shares a land border with another sovereign state‍—‌the Republic of Ireland. Apart from this land border, the United Kingdom is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the North Sea to the east, the English Channel to the south and the Celtic Sea to the south-west, giving it the 12th-longest coastline in the world. The Irish Sea lies between Great Britain and Ireland. With an area of 242,500 square kilometres (93,600 sq mi), the United Kingdom is the 78th-largest sovereign state in the world. It is also the 22nd-most populous country, with an estimated 66.0 million inhabitants in 2017.

Tom Waits American singer-songwriter and actor

Thomas Alan Waits is an American singer, songwriter, musician, composer, and actor. Waits' music is characterized by his distinctive deep, gravelly singing voice and lyrics focusing on the underside of U.S. society. During the 1970s, he worked primarily in jazz, but since the 1980s his music has reflected greater influence from blues, vaudeville, and experimental genres.

Track listing

No.	Title	Writer(s)	Length
1.	"Bold Sir Rylas"	Child 18, Trad.	4:36
2.	"Old Maui"	Trad.	4:13
3.	"Horn Fair"	Trad.	3:37
4.	"Child Morris"	Trad.	7:10
5.	"Innocent When You Dream"	Tom Waits	4:41
6.	"Cruel Knife"	Trad.	4:43
7.	"Derry Gaol"	Trad.	4:18
8.	"On Christmas Day"	Trad.	1:21
9.	"Doleful Dance of Death"	Trad.	3:03
10.	"Bill Brown"	Trad.	4:09
11.	"Lucy Wan"	Trad.	5:29
Total length:			47:26

Personnel

Jon Boden (vocals, fiddle, guitar, concertina)
John Spiers (vocals, melodeons, concertina, bandoneon).

Jon Boden is a singer, composer and musician, best known as lead singer and main arranger of Bellowhead. His first instrument is the fiddle and he is a leading proponent of "English traditional fiddle style" and also of "fiddle singing", both of which he employed in Bellowhead, in the duo Spiers & Boden, and previously as a member of Eliza Carthy’s Ratcatchers.

Fiddling refers to the act of playing the fiddle, and fiddlers are musicians that play it. A fiddle is a bowed string musical instrument, most often a violin. It is a colloquial term for the violin, used by players in all genres including classical music. Although violins and fiddles are essentially synonymous, the style of the music played may determine specific construction differences between fiddles and classical violins. For example, fiddles may optionally be set up with a bridge with a flatter arch to reduce the range of bow-arm motion needed for techniques such as the double shuffle, a form of bariolage involving rapid alternation between pairs of adjacent strings. To produce a "brighter" tone, compared to the deeper tones of gut or synthetic core strings, fiddlers often use steel strings. The fiddle is part of many traditional (folk) styles, which are typically aural traditions—taught 'by ear' rather than via written music.

The guitar is a fretted musical instrument that usually has six strings. It is typically played with both hands by strumming or plucking the strings with either a guitar pick or the finger(s)/fingernails of one hand, while simultaneously fretting with the fingers of the other hand. The sound of the vibrating strings is projected either acoustically, by means of the hollow chamber of the guitar, or through an electrical amplifier and a speaker.

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