Adrian Roye

In our travels through the murder ballad genre, we go into a few kinds of terrain with some regularity. Sometimes, it’s a deep dive into an “old country” of traditional, if not ancient, murder ballads. These might be “Twa Sisters” or “The House Carpenter,” songs that made the journey across the ocean long ago. At other times, it’s a sort of “new world,” but with songs from the past 50 years or so that have become popular favorites–like “El Paso” or last week’s “Lake Marie.” Other times, we go exploring into “undiscovered country,” and find acts that are newer and less well-known. They are developing our genre in this age, not a past one, and keeping it refreshed. This is one of those weeks.

Adrian Roye and the Exiles are a North London based “afro-folk” band who will be releasing their first full-length album in the spring of 2014. Roye reached out in June of 2012 and shared “Josephine” with us on our Facebook page. The song is from the EP Telephones and Traffic Lights, released in 2009.

“Josephine” will be our song for the week. It will be a new one for many of you, but it pulls on the deep cords of our genre in haunting, beautiful, and elemental ways, while still giving us something new to consider. We’re fortunate that Roye has agreed to talk with us about the song, and our next post will include an interview with him.

In today’s post, I’m going to provide you with a brief introduction to “Josephine.” You’ll be glad to meet her.

If I can’t get it through with words…

One challenge of writing this post is that I’ve known the song for a little while now. It will be a challenge to recapture my first impressions. The best I can do in that regard is to invite you to listen before I continue.

Listen to “Josephine” on Adrian Roye and the Exiles’ Bandcamp site here.

Lyrics

My first reaction was “Wow! This song is grim.”  At the time we first got word of it from Roye, I was reluctant to take it up. I was put off by the unrepentant menace of the protagonist, and the twisting of love, possession, and hatred in his words. The intermingling of love and violence is familiar in our songs, particularly the older ones, but this song was very fresh, and redemption and judgment were hard to find.

I was also trying to make sense at the time of the strains of misogyny flowing through the murder ballad tradition. Why is it we cultivate this theme artistically if it’s not somehow to affirm it? I’m still trying to figure that out, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I’m convinced there’s a good answer. Perhaps it’s found in the realization that it’s important to say some things sometimes that we don’t ourselves mean. Rather, it’s meaningful to sing them or hear them sung. How does putting on the character of a villain in a song different from reading about one in a book or watching one in a movie? There’s still authentic aesthetic value there, but a song always feels more personal. We’ll hear more about this in the next post.

Something about Roye’s performance kept calling me back, though, and the song grew on me. The wail of the chorus was a hook, as was the hummed refrain. Eventually, I discovered that the song is telling more of a story than I initially supposed.

“Josephine” is one of the few songs that Roye performs solo, and stands out by way of theme and arrangement from the rest of the EP. As noted in this review by George Mitton from 2010, Roye’s composition here hearkens back to Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night (In the Pines).” Leadbelly’s classic is one that one of our bloggers plans to dig into in the relatively near future, so I’ll provide a reference version, and defer a deeper discussion until then.

Roye conveys the deranged inner fury of the protagonist quite effectively. As with artists like Richard Thompson or Nick Cave, Roye doesn’t pull the punches on these feelings. He goes all the way into them. This was part of my hesitation at the start, but also key to why I felt I needed to come back to it.

When I did, I found something new that I didn’t hear there before. Some of you are doubtless more perceptive than I, and already got there, but it was really this video for the song that opened it up for me.

Roye gives the listener more room to move around in the story than I initially supposed, and like all good artists provides opportunities for different readings. This is crucial for this song. Through his choice of perspective we’re invited to imagine the other side of the story, too. Once you’ve seen the video and listened closely to the end of the song, you might think he’s done just the opposite and just changed one definitive reading for another. It’s just possible that Roye is, in his own way, balancing the scales. But, I believe it’s more subtle than that, and this song leaves a few loose ends provocatively untied.

We’ll sort some of that out in the next post, where we’ll talk to Adrian Roye, and hear another, more recent performance of “Josephine” and more great music.

Adrian Roye and the Exiles Dan Paton, Simon Lewis, Adrian Roye, and Beth Dariti