9Bach’s Lisa Jen Brown on the art of storytelling

When you put these stories with beautiful melodies then – oh! – it’s dreamland. In any language – in all the languages – the folk song tradition is sublime. Without a language you can understand, the story through the melody – it’s very clever!

For me, the Welsh folk songs are our soul music, our roots, and a taste of what our ancestors saw and felt. They are ‘their’ stories but most of the time sit so close to the emotion and ‘feeling’ we can relate to now. That’s why we can really feel it when we sing them.

I guess the natural progression for me as a singer – also new to songwriting – was to write about the stories I felt that needed to be told. Based on the emotion, the political significance and a determination to sing about it. From the true story of a girl befriending a crow that brings her gifts, to the story of the Queen of The Black Lake from the novel that changed me as a teenager, to Ivan who grew up in Moscow with a pack of wild dogs, to The Stolen Generation – the atrocity of forcibly removing the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent, by the Australian Federal and State government.

These are stories that, to me, have to be told. It is something I want to sing about! The stream of beautiful old Welsh traditional songs that have been handed down to us (a gift to say the least) have done pain and heartache and love so well that I can’t even dream of matching them. It’s more interesting for me to be reaching out and listening to stories from a world with no borders and responding to them by simply telling their stories.