Charlotte Yates – Winter’s Eye (13th Floor Album Review)
The best gifts can arrive in small packages. After seven solo albums, songwriter Charlotte Yates offers us Winter’s Eye, a sparkling EP. Replete with arresting lyrics, these songs take us places and serve as a reminder of the lyrical craft underlying the process of composition.
Winter’s Eye is co-produced by Brooke Singer of French for Rabbits who also contributes synthesiser, piano and backing vocal. The Rabbits’ drummer and percussionist Hikurangi Shaverien-Kaa also features along with an impressive line-up of other guests.
That there is such a constellation of contributors should be no surprise as Yates is a community-builder. Her resume includes curating landmark collections of songs by the full suite of Aotearoa’s songwriters adapted from the work of writers such as James K Baxter, Hone Tuwhare and Katherine Mansfield. To complete the sense of community, the EP’s cover features Tonight In the Mystic Garden, a magnificent work by visual artist Elizabeth Thomson, the title of which references a Bob Dylan lyric.
The collection comprises seven lively and reflective songs carried along with pulsing synthesised rhythms. Hints of 90’s Tim Finn perhaps. Opening track Hailstones has an onomatopoeic quality, synthesiser mimicking frozen pellets on a tin roof, repeating notes reminiscent of a Philip Glass composition. Rain seeps into the lyrics of so many kiwi songs. In this case, were the lyrics influenced by Tuwhare’s signature poem, Rain, I wonder?
Second track, Garden, is a love song built around a simile: In your arms it’s like a garden. That primal site of growth, respite and sanctuary is the yearned-for place when, in a state of estrangement, the writer is left calling “Hey hey you across the great divide/All the way over on the other side”.
The Waters Edge is the song most evocative of local geographies: “Driving down that inward bound road that wiggles up the bay into town on the edge of the island”. It could be a line from a Frank Sargeson story. The literary quality to Yates’ lyrics sparkle. Forces beyond us are acknowledged as redemptive with “I realise the turning tide/pulls us through to the other side”.
On Gold there is intrigue. It’s the West Coast, A brother has been lost and “Your gold would make a dirty river shine offering a little light to this unforgiving time”.
Before It Changes Everything is a wistful departure song in which the writer and a soon-to-be-traveller are “stuck in lost and found” with the urge to “throw every minute in your suitcase/On this last sweet afternoon”
The single from this collection, Push Back begins with a voice-over “I can’t stop time from passing.” And, with pulsing sound, the song is set against the repeated chant “tides a comin’ in”.
The last track is the eponymous Winter’s Eye. Over a driving beat, the writer sings of tenacity and resilience. Again, the lyrics are potent “To start again in the face of the flood and every broken fence/To start again in the face of the sun”. An anthem that speaks to both personal and collective resilience in a volatile landscape.
It’s a mark of great songs when, after only a couple of plays, they feel like they have been travelling companions for years. These are such songs: strong yet delicate; joyous yet wistful; uplifting yet challenging.
Charlotte Yates offers a cycle of songs for our time with lyrics, music and vocal delivery woven together with a rare potency.
Robin Kearns
Winter’s Eye is released today.
Charlotte Yates and the multi-instrumentalist Show Pony look forward to performing a two-set show featuring all songs from Winter’s Eye at several venues over the coming months:
29 March The Shed, Alicetown, Lower Hutt
5 April Ohau house concert, Ohau
2 May Jam Factory, Tauranga
3 May Kauaeranga Hall, Thames Valley
