Interview with Melanie Crew and Ross Palmer
on Album Some Other Stories, Behind the Music Scenes, Gigs, Radio and more…

Interview by Louise Cannon

Earlier in the week, I invited Melanie Crew and Ross Palmer to feature on my blog. Two normal down to earth people making big waves on the music scene with their new album Some Other Stories.
They have been composing their own songs and singing them for a number of years together and on solo work. BBC Radio 6, BBC Essex, BBC Kent, local radio stations and community radio station all support this duo from London and their unique brand of folk music and occasional songs with a sea shanty vibe too. You can also find them across all streaming platforms.
They also perform at various gigs in London and across the country when they aren’t doing their “day jobs”. You can find gig details for April and September within the interview.

Some Other Stories, available now. The album is highly relevant and mixes fun with thought-provoking, poignant lyrics that gently touch the heart and mind. The songs, coupled with their rather sweet, melodic voices makes the album easy to listen to in the car or when out walking. I have a link to their album near the end of the interview.

Please give a warm welcome to Melanie and Ross who have both answered questions below with fascinating answers so you can get to know who they are and take a little sneaky peek behind the music scene too.

1. Who or what inspired you to sing and play folk music and why does this particular genre of music attract you to perform it?

Ross: Speaking personally, the initial attraction when I was in my late teens was the guitar playing.

I started to listen to people like Bert Jansch and Davy Graham, and slightly more singer-songwriter-y types who came out of the 1960s folk scene in the UK, like Nick Drake and John Martyn. Hearing their virtuoso fingerpicking styles and alternate tunings absolutely knocked my socks off! You just didn’t hear that style of guitar playing in contemporary music at the time – not in pop or rock, anyway.

Once I started listening to them, I started hearing these songs that were part of the tradition of folk music, centuries-old ballads that have fantastic stories to tell and have been kept alive through the folk process and mostly sung unaccompanied.

2. Melanie and Ross, you write your own songs and compose your own music. What is your creative process?

Ross: We tend to write separately for the most part, then we bring our songs to each other to start playing, working out harmonies and extra instrumental parts. We do a lot of the recording at home, and it will usually start with a guitar and vocal performance by whoever wrote the song, which we’ll then add to with extra guitars or harmonies, and sometimes bass and drums.

If we need an instrument neither of us play, we dip into the network of people we know from the London folk and singer-songwriter circuits. We’re lucky enough to know some fabulous musicians like pianist Nick Frater, double bassist Adam Beattie and violinist Basia Bartz, all of whom are writers and singers and multi-instrumentalists themselves and bring a songwriter’s ear to their instrumental parts.

3. You have been featured on Radio 6. What was that like and what was the impact, especially since you not only write music, you also have rather ordinary jobs in the mix.

Melanie: A few songs from my solo EPs were played by Tom Robinson on BBC 6 Music, and since then we have both played live on BBC Essex, and Ross has played live on BBC Kent as well. We’re really grateful for the support we’ve had from local radio, not just the BBC but many other local and community-run stations.

This year, for the first time, some of our songs were played on radio shows in the US which was really nice – we recorded a live performance for the Great American Folk Show, which was broadcast on National Public Radio. Shows like this help us reach more people. However, our everyday lives haven’t changed all that much: we both have full-time jobs, and this means we are a bit more limited in how much time we’re able to spend promoting our music.  

4. How do you agree what to keep and what to discard?

Ross: If one of us has a song we think the other will like, we’ll try playing it together and if we feel like it works we’ll record it. There are occasions when we’ll finish a recording but decide it’s not quite right for the album or EP we’re making, in which case we’ll hold it back and see if it finds a home later.

5. You create images within the lyrics, especially in Take a Picture where there are reminisces of the past in scenery, the younger self and present feelings. What inspired and experiences did you draw on to write this song?

Melanie: This song, and another song called Look Back on Before which is also on the album, are both about looking back on past experiences, whilst also trying to ‘be present’ in the current moment and not letting life pass you by. Look Back on Before is a slightly more personal song – there is a line in it about having a ‘personal archive in a drawer’, which refers to a drawer I have at home full of all the diaries and notebooks I have kept over the years. Take a Picture has a similar theme of reminiscing but for this one I imagined a scenario where someone was thinking of a past relationship/friendship and happy times they spent with that person by the seaside. With lyrics, usually I have a very general concept or idea and then build something around that. 

6. Making Lists, the title of a song, is something lots of people do. You turn it on its head, almost getting people to look at them and ask deep questions about finding advice and that human thing of validation, seeping into that sense of wellbeing. When you wrote this song, what impact did it have on you both and listeners who make all manner of lists?

Melanie:  I love a good list! My phone is full of lists I have made (places I want to go, exhibitions I want to see, TV shows I want to watch, books I want to read). I also keep a list each year of all the things I’ve done. These lists help me keep track of things, and not forget stuff.  As someone who likes to plan, rather than do things spontaneously, they are very helpful! The song Making Lists is about trying to plan ahead and bring some sense of order to everyday life, but not getting too hung-up on things, by overthinking decisions or seeking external validation all the time. 

7. Close the Book is another philosophical book of when people are captured at their best, a guilty man taking the stand and when the book is closed on life and all is brushed aside. What influenced this song?

Ross: When I started that lyric, I had an image in my mind of a musician being filmed playing on stage in a TV studio, with a big clock on the studio wall. It made me think about how everything in a mediated world gets turned into a kind of performance for public consumption, even the act of being an artist. So the images in the lyrics all came out of that: being on stage or being photographed, while simultaneously feeling like a condemned man about to be executed and then forgotten.

I guess the song is about the futility of the images that we construct of ourselves for the consumption of others. Not just celebrities or influencers or performers, but basically all of us create a version of ourselves for the public that we want to be thought of as really being like.

8. Blindly Through the World and Our Captain Cried All Hands has a light sea shanty vibe in the music, a bit different from some of the other songs that have a folk music vibe. How did you find changing up the tempo and sound of the songs?

Ross: Our Captain particularly was a tricky one! The melody was “collected” by the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1909 and is also used for a couple of more famous pieces: a folk song called The Blacksmith and a hymn called To Be a Pilgrim (or He Who Would Valiant Be), which we sang all the time at my Catholic secondary school.

It’s in a slightly knotty time signature of 7/4, so there’s one beat fewer than you expect, which made playing the drums on it a challenge. What’s lovely about that song is how differently it’s been interpreted by the people who have sung it. Granny’s Attic recorded a beautifully slow and melancholy version of it a few years ago, just voice and concertina, while an American freak-folk group has a very droney, modal arrangement of the song for four voices.

9. Have you got any gigs coming up and what’s next for you both in your music career?

Melanie: Yes, we have a couple of shows in April – we’re playing at Redbridge Music Lounge on 10 April, and then we’re playing at a new songwriters’ event at the Ignition Brewery in Sydenham (southeast London) on 25 April. Later in the year we’re really looking forward to returning to St Edith folk club in Sevenoaks on 25 September.

In terms of what’s next, we are planning on re-recording some old songs to give them a bit of a fresh update – then hopefully releasing those, along with a couple of new songs, on an EP. 

10. Where can people find you and listen across social media and streaming services?

Melanie: You can listen to our music on all the usual streaming platforms like Spotify, YouTube music, Apple music, Amazon music. You can also find us on Bandcamp at https://melaniecre wandrosspalmer.bandcamp.com/ album/some-other-stories.

On social media you can follow us on Instagram (@melaniecrewandrosspalmer). For general updates (e.g. on gigs) you can sign up to our mailing list on our website at https://melaniecrewandrossp almer.com