Consumate storyteller explores new musical territory with addition of evocative string arrangements.

Release date and album launch at Cambridge Folk Club: 22nd March 2022.

On his ninth album ‘A Sudden Rain’ Cambridge-based lyrical storytelling songwriter John Meed explores new musical ideas and territory with the addition of evocative and emotive string arrangements and a choir. ‘The songs only reached their current form thanks to Lucinda Fudge and Matt Kelly, whose beautiful string arrangements brought them to life, and to Rhys Wilson, who gave patient advice and help with recording and production, and who mastered the album’ says John. Equally the choir Mnatobi joined him on Thessalonika, and Hedy Boland played kora on Strasbourg.

Regarding the songs John states that ‘After a long songwriting drought, spending time in Nepal in 2019 reawakened my creativity and all but one of these songs emerged over the following year and a half.’ Four songs on the album: Panauti, Real life, Summer rain and Progress, were directly inspired by the Nepal experience. John adds: ‘In Panauti we had the great privilege to stay with a local family, whose hospitality was remarkable. And across the country, we were time and again touched by the warmth of the welcome we received.’

Real life stories have always inspired John and this is certainly the case with three of the album’s songs. On Le boulevard du Strasbourg John states that: ‘Les 18 du 57 boulevard du Strasbourg’ – workers without papers – went on strike against their appalling working conditions, and won the right to regularisation after occupying their workplace. Many of the words for the song come from the workers themselves in a film produced by the Collectif des Cinéastes pour les sans-papiers’. Cotton famine road tells the story of how the American civil war cut off supplies of cotton to the Lancashire mills. Rochdale mill workers, aware that their cotton had been picked by slaves, supported the struggle for freedom, despite the resulting ‘cotton famine’. Public funding paid them to build the road across Rooley Moor, an area where John used to walk during his childhood.

Thessalonika is an older song that John had always wanted to re-record with strings and a choir. ‘It’s about Zoe Kaltaki, a remarkable Greek woman who fought the Nazis in her native Greece, and then fought for the communists against the Greek army, before fleeing to exile in Czechoslovakia’ he states. ‘When she finally returned home she was asked where she felt more at home and she replied, rather ambiguously, ‘I feel at home where I can be myself’. John comments: ‘I felt her story somehow summed up the turbulent twentieth century.’

The remaining 3 songs tell differing tales. Rooted is a song of belonging or seeking to belong, Arden, with its nod to Shakespeare, is an emotive tale, while the album concludes with Don’t Look Back urging us to learn from the past, but to look to the future. John’s writing has been compared to Al Stewart, Leonard Cohen, Christy Moore, Jacques Brel and Richard Thompson, widely reviewed and played on many BBC and community radio shows and stations across the UK and beyond.

‘A sublime singer-songwriter, whose beautiful songs are thoughtful, emotional and political.’ Strummers, Cambridge

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