Angry Baby recently brought you the music of Holding Poison, a band that came together and recorded in lockdown. The lockdown approach is obviously catching because as a result of lockdown, Nigel Paramor, aka Mister Wulf, released his first ever album at the age of 60. Titled Big Sky: Songs From A Lockdown Year, the album developed after Nigel began writing his own songs over the last few years (he played drums for years), having a handful of songs ready by early 2020 – and then lockdown happened. Nigel borrowed a Macmini with the plan to learn how to record his songs and off he went. As he says,
“It was a steep learning curve but I loved it, and of course the lockdown provided me with much more scope for writing new songs too. As the year progressed, and I invested in slightly better gear and got a bit more proficient at recording, an album of songs started to emerge.”
Beginning with the title track, Big Sky is an album with a lush sound and feel; you can feel the love oozing out of these carefully crafted songs. Emanating from a lockdown discussion, ‘Big Sky‘ is infused with the power of positive thinking when things are difficult, such as missing family in the last year. This aspect of lockdown is reflected in ‘Song for Oscar‘, a lullaby written for Nigel’s first grandson, born in March 2020.
‘Six Feet Under‘, ‘Jackanory‘ and ‘The Moment When‘ show the diverse range of Nigel’s musical influences, with gentle blues and reggae tones amongst the underlying indie-folk base. ‘Jackanory’ and “the stories we tell” in particular, took me back to my childhood (showing my age!) and the powerful memories that shared stories have for us all.
My favourite track is ‘Where I Am With You‘, a song that sings of love and contentment being linked to people, not material things or places. In a year like no other, many of us have relearnt what makes us content and happy – and this song nails it down to that one line: “where I am with you”. It’s a lilting folk song that encapsulates the feeling of the album overall.
Nigel is based in Chester and throughout lockdown has seen the devastation caused by loss of income around his locality. With Big Sky under his belt, what better way to support his local food bank, West Cheshire, than to release a fundraising single, ‘Catastrophe’, which was released in mid March.
Big Sky was released on in January 2021. Get your copy here.
Catastrophe was released on 12 March 2021. Get your copy here – all proceeds to the Trussell Trust and West Cheshire Foodbank.
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