Sing it for a lifetime

"As if [Talbot's] personal trials and tribulations weren't enough, the global pandemic necessitated this became a virtual recording with digital music files flying back and forth across the ocean. However, this hasn't hindered the creation of a set of seamless recordings. So comfortable was Talbot that [producer, Appalachian musician Dirk] Powell encouraged her to record some very personal co-compositions that find her wearing her heart on her sleeve. Most direct of all is 'I Let You Go' with its parting message to her former partner. Also revealing is 'Empty Promise Land' which finds Mark Knopfler on guitar as Dirk Powell duets on a song he wrote some time ago about the smouldering nature of a breakup".

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"Heidi Talbot's latest album is borne from separation and adversity - recorded in a home in the process of being sold as she negotiated her split from partner John McCusker, with whom she had lived and worked for more than a decade. Still, she's never had a hard time in attracting talented accomplices and guests - the likes of Tim O'Brien and Mark Knopfler graced 2013's Angels Without Wings, and for her sixth solo set she takes a transatlantic voyage from Celtic folk to Americana and country heartbreak, with guest turns from Knopfler, Appalachian fiddler and producer Dirk Powell, Scottish fiddler Seonaid Aitken and Dire Straits' keyboardist Guy Fletcher among others. Her beautiful voice is on great form, tackling life's emotional hardships and revelations, right from the off with album opener 'Sing It for a Lifetime', written, she says, in 15 minutes - although as Powell ripostes, it was in her all along".