Richard Hawley, Hollow Meadows - album review: Heartfelt reflections that shine a light on a son of Sheffield’s soul

Hollow Meadows may be Richard Hawley’s most personal album yet; which is entirely appropriate, given his etymological note linking the locale’s old name Auley Meadows with his own patronymic, the Hawley family having lived there between the 14th and 17th centuries. Another staging-point on his titular tour of Sheffield, the name refers to a building on the city’s border with the Peak District that served as a hiding-place for the afflicted, be they shell-shocked soldiers from the Great War, defective offspring of the aristocracy, or, as recently as the Sixties, a hospice for psychiatric patients: blighted lives over which a discreet veil, according to the attitude of earlier times, might hopefully be drawn.

As such, it at first seems a strange choice for an album of songs seeking to reveal anxieties of a particularly personal nature, from the revelation of parental pain in “What Love Means”, occasioned by his daughter’s leaving home (“Child of mine bereft, I’ll never forget the day you left”) to the ruminations on life and love in “Sometimes I Feel”, which contains some of his most affecting imagery, like “There’s a sea of longing in my heart, but I know I cannot ever sail it”. A litany of “things I know to be true” picked out over harpsichord arpeggios, it’s the album’s crucial centre, its core reflection. There’s an openness about Hawley’s writing here that cuts straight to the quick – as if he’s digging through the ruins of his own Hollow Meadows, to try and shine a light on his soul.

The album was conceived and mostly written while Hawley himself was at home, recuperating from first a broken leg, then a slipped disc. Unable to move, he naturally became more introspective in songs like “Welcome the Sun” (a yearning desire to escape his shadowy confinement and face the light), “Which Way” and “Nothing Like a Friend”, a bleakly comforting acknowledgement that “in the end, the things that hold you in are gossamer thin, disappeared with the wind”. Posited against that fragility, however, is the strength of “Heart of Oak”, a tribute to folk singer Norma Waterson, celebrated in robust, rocking chords. Another folk artist, virtuoso guitarist (and Hawley’s neighbour) Martin Simpson, contributes sparkling banjo and slide resonator guitar to “Long Time Down”, a sinister piece that hints at a darker, maybe murderous, co-dependency lurking behind a relationship.

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Warmth and foreboding are interwoven throughout the album, which contains several of Hawley’s trademark ballads, his double-edged croon disguising the conflicted emotions of “Serenade of Blue” and “Tuesday pm”. More directly romantic is the album opener “I Still Want You”, where sultry vibrato guitar underpins his restatement of enduring devotion. It’s followed, in a way that bowls a googly as regards the album’s general drift, by “The World Looks Down”, his fretful reflection on the way that life is becoming increasingly mediated by screens, placing us at one further remove from our actual lives.

As ever, the musical craft involved in Hollow Meadows is nonpareil, Hawley and his band (notably co-producers Shez Sheridan and Colin Elliot) doing much of the recording in his garden shed studio, Disgracelands – and sometimes with the shed door open, judging by the way that children’s voices twitter across the psychedelic swirl that closes “Sometimes I Feel”. It’s entirely apt, reflecting the open-hearted nature of an album that seeks to share emotions, and sources happiness in simple fellowship, family and community.