One mark of an exceptional musician is not just the ability, but the hunger to challenge oneself in unexpected ways. As effectively alluring as it has always been, Bella Hardy - last year’s BBC folk singer of the year - has never settled for the comfort zone of the folk tradition that first embraced her.
Unveiling a dramatic new haircut along with her transition into an emotive singer songwriter, Hardy launched her new album With the Dawn with an affecting set encompassing plentiful humour and banter with her understated five-piece band alongside a starkly personalised fresh body of songs depicting a year in her life. Ushered confidently in by the wondrous Anna Massie’s intricate banjo on First Light of the Morning, with Ben Seal programming a variety of subtle effects and brass sounds, this is a confidently crafted unit whose uplifting feel belies the soul-searching that apparently enveloped her in her 30th year.
If With the Dawn follows a well-trodden path of break-up albums, its phrasing and musicality make it more sophisticated than most. Delivered with pained simplicity, Oh! My God! I Miss You already sounds like it could be a show-stopper from a West End musical, and songs like The Only Thing to Do and Lullaby for a Grieving Man confront thoughts of displacement and insecurity in original ways.
Hardy’s disdain for the shackles of genre has previously manifested itself in, among other things, Shakin’ Stevens’s Merry Christmas Everyone and Patsy Cline’s Walking After Midnight and here, responding to a seemingly random audience request, she delivers a sumptuous What a Wonderful World. Voices so naturally beguiling as hers don’t require definition.
Her new material still occasionally doffs its cap to the tradition. Jolly Good Luck to the Girl That Loves a Soldier, like the award-winning The Herring Girl – also beautifully performed tonight – underlines Hardy’s importance as a persuasive champion of women’s perspective, something in which folk song hasn’t always been well blessed.
