We weren’t playing much, besides a few songs Hannah was writing, which were different from those we’d been playing out over the past few years – quieter, more personal. Lockdown saw us and our music at a pretty low ebb: we’d tried to go full-time in December 2019 and had spent the winter booking shows for the spring and summer, which were all cancelled. “Working Late is our first release under our new name, Fritillaries.
Gabriel shared the following on the duo’s name change and their forthcoming debut album: Working Late has a high lonesome quality, especially in Hannah’s vocals which deeply underpin the hopelessness of the situation that many find themselves in through no fault of their own. We feel it’s catchy and dark and enigmatic, with an immediacy that comes from only having a couple hours to learn, arrange and record.” Andy Hamill (double bass) helped us dig into the groove, with Kit Massey (fiddle) adding bluegrass energy and snarl and Ru Lemer (producer) adding cohesion and helping dig into the song’s pop sensibility. We ended up trying it out during the recording session for our single Little Bird, with the impromptu arrangement that emerged becoming the single. “The song as I’d written it was angry and hurting, and we didn’t get very far arranging it as a duo. The people I felt I’d let down are who the song is about, most importantly the people who deserve the support they seldom receive. Leaving that role after years of training I felt I was letting those people down again, as well as colleagues and friends who were trying enormously hard under impossible circumstances. As an agent of a broken system, I had felt I was letting people down who desperately needed support. I left this career feeling pretty broken, like the system in which I had played a part. I found the necessary impartiality of being a social worker difficult: I was an agent of the state supporting people oppressed by the very state I was representing. I had been training and working as a social worker from 2016-2019 and came across many people in desperate situations, including asylum seekers with the constant threat of deportation or detention and the very real prospect of being separated from their families, lives and loved ones. “I was thinking about the UK’s treatment of asylum seekers and the systems which perpetuate mistreatment. Hannah shared the following on the new single Working Late: They have also launched a Kickstarter for their debut album, which you can support here.
Originally from Exmouth, Devon, Hannah Pawson and Gabriel Wynne are now based in Bristol and have a new name: Fritillaries.Īlongside the announcement of their name change, the duo are releasing a new single on the 10th of December titled ‘ Working Late‘, a brooding song of anger and frustration about the treatment of asylum seekers in the UK.
If these two faces look familiar, then it may be because they have previously featured on Folk Radio as Rainy Day Woman.