Grace Elizabeth Harvey releases new EP 'Songs Of Devotion'

Liverpool singer-songwriter Grace Elizabeth Harvey today releases her new EP Songs Of Devotion: five songs of beautifully arranged indie-folk, exploring the vulnerability of love and the frustrations of miscommunication. Following a sold-out headline show at Rough Trade Liverpool last night, Harvey continues her UK tour in Sheffield tonight, with Manchester and London dates to follow later this month.

New single and opening track 'An Ode' offers a portrait of falling in love over a summer in London. Moving freely between fingerpicked guitar and intimate images of tangled hair and calloused fingertips, the song then gives way to an increasingly impassioned full-band outro, drawing on the unrestrained vocalisations of Leonard Cohen's 'One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong'.

"This song began as a love poem I wrote in my notebook, changing trains at Crewe travelling from London back to Liverpool," Harvey explains.

"I was coming back from seeing the person the song is about in London. The first seeds of the song were the 'tangled senseless' gold thread of hair and the line about the ‘word-cherries’. This song is an offering to the lover, an ode to them, with words that are so pleasurable but full of risk and fear. The intensity of this song represents that bittersweet, excited but fearful feeling of the vulnerability of new love."

The new EP features previously shared singles, 'Devotion' and 'The Dream of Common Language', drawing early praise from BBC 6Music's Gideon Coe and Craig Charles, BBC Radio Scotland's Roddy Hart and BBC Radio Wales' Frank Hennessy, with further glowing press support from Stereogum ("Lovely. If you're in need of a little calm, a little introspection, a little Laura Marling or Joni Mitchell"), CLASH Magazine ("A wonderful moment of zero gravity songwriting"), The Line of Best Fit, Dork Magazine and more.

Written during a year spent moving between Liverpool, London and Manchester, Songs Of Devotion grew out of train journeys, second-hand bookshops and nights on borrowed sofas. The circumstances of its writing became part of its sound: songs quietly fingerpicked in other people's flats, on London balconies, or late at night, careful not to wake anyone nearby. Harvey’s conversational delivery carries that intimacy into recordings where guitar, double bass, drums and cello give shape to feelings that words struggle to contain.

"I am always addressing a question when I write. For this EP it is language and miscommunication," Harvey explains. "The songs are an effort to either communicate the feeling of this tension, pull apart the question, or answer it. I see them as a collection of songs – that is very important."

Recorded over five days in March at producer Gus White's residential studio The Barn in Wiltshire, the EP brought Harvey together with double bassist Sam Crooks and drummer Lloyd Haines. Arriving without demos, she worked collaboratively with the trio to shape the arrangements through experimentation and live takes, adding cello and harmonium herself, with White contributing piano and percussion.

Mixed and mastered to tape, Harvey's delicate - almost spoken-word delivery - sits at the centre of performances shaped by both the sound of language and its meaning; Harvey's lyrics balance unusual, ambiguous phrasing with strikingly precise imagery, allowing the cadence of words to become part of the music itself.

Across the EP, 'Devotion' confronts the emptiness of being left without explanation, while 'Where Tomorrow Meets Today' pares the arrangements back to intricate nylon-string guitar and double bass, searching for understanding in the spaces between words.

Inspired by finding Adrienne Rich’s poetry collection The Dream of a Common Language in a charity shop, 'The Dream Of Common Language' opens conversationally before blooming into a sprawling instrumental passage. Closing song 'Forget' serves as the collection’s epilogue, weighing missed calls, unfulfilled promises and imperfect goodbyes against the possibility of falling in love again.

Growing up on the Wirral, Harvey taught herself guitar before falling in love with the cello, later specialising in Baroque music through the Junior Royal Northern College of Music before studying English Literature and Philosophy at Durham University.

Using open tunings, informed by her background in Baroque cello, Harvey approaches the guitar as a second melodic voice in her writing, its counter-melodies and harmonic movement becoming as expressive as her lyrics themselves.

Since releasing her debut EP Other Faith, Grace Elizabeth Harvey has toured extensively across the UK, sharing stages with Josienne Clarke, Villagers, James Yorkston, Chris Brain, Chloe Foy and Florist, winning the Young Songwriter Competition and recently being awarded PPL's Momentum Accelerator Fund.

Grace Elizabeth Harvey's new EP Songs Of Devotion is out now, available to purchase on CD, on limited eco-mix blue vinyl via Rough Trade and 10" black vinyl from her website. Grace Elizabeth Harvey plays Cafe No. 9 in Sheffield this evening, before headline dates in Manchester and London later this month.

LIVE DATES

• 16th October - Sheffield, Cafe No. 9
• 25th October - Manchester, Castle Hotel
• 29th October - London, Green Note

Songs Of Devotion  track list

1. An Ode

2. Devotion

3. Where Tomorrow Meets Today

4. The Dream Of Common Language

5. Forget