It’s no coincidence that Azalea, the debut album by Austin-based folk musician Natalie Jane Hill, was released in mid-May. The latest album on Dear Life Records, it bloomed alongside its namesake in a moment of perfect synchronicity, fitting for a record that takes much of its inspiration from earthly rhythms. For with Azalea, Hill taps into the wax and wane of mother nature, and emerges with patterns altogether more human.
Natalie Jane Hill developed this connection to the natural world early on. “I spent my childhood living in small Texas towns out in the country and always had access to the woods, meadows, rivers,” she says. “I learned at a young age that this is where I need to spend most of my time.” But it was moving out to North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains that forged the link between nature and folk music. Inspired in equal parts by the local folk scene and the plants and flowers that grew in and around the mountains, Hill began to create her own styles and progressions of finger-picked guitar to express both her inner thoughts and the landscape she found herself in. “Everything around me was so poetically beautiful,” she says. “I had a strong desire to intertwine all that I was seeing with all that I was feeling.”
And that’s exactly what Azalea does. The record references centuries-old folk traditions and millennia-old landscapes to capture what Hill calls “passing moments, subtle revelations and quiet truths.” She cites pioneers Michael Hurley and Connie Converse as well as contemporary acts such as Tamara Lindeman’s The Weather Station as influences, which goes some way to explaining how her style sounds at once novel and timeless. Hill’s guitar is no more or less than a tool that channels the natural world, echoing her surroundings with every finger-picked rhythm and cyclical melody. And its beauty lies not just in simple prettiness but in the harsher moments too. There are moments where the lines sound burred and knotted, prickly even, and others where it spins a sense of calm like the puddles of cool shade in a sun-dappled hollow.
Many of the songs were written during a spell in the Georgia Piedmont, another period in which Hill developed a strong connection with the natural world. “There’s a park called Cochran’s Mill that’s just down the road from where I lived,” she describes. “I spent countless hours walking in those woods and on those trails. I’d forage for wild mushrooms or sit in silence next to the falls. I’d listen to the choir of frogs and patiently watch how the forest would change each month.”
Azalea is suffused with this sense of flux, following the changing seasons and how they affect the sights and sounds of the land. “The goldenrods have finally faded,” Hill sings at the beginning of opener ‘Goldenrod’ transporting us to a cold meadow in which even the late bloomers have withered for another year. Songs like ‘River Light’ and ‘Emerald Blue’ on the other hand are set in the midst of summer (“A mid July sun / beating down on your ink covered arms”), while ‘Great Blue Heron’ is full of the promise of spring. “Am I still capable?” Hill asks, “to bloom in a world of light colored green?” conjuring a time of year when the air is thick with possibility, loaded with the doubt and faith inherent in new beginnings.
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Hill says she considers her songs as poems, at least in their early stages, and it is easy to see why. Her writing is intricate and impressionistic, fleeting images rendered in swoops and flicks that coalesce to evoke implicit thoughts, fleeting sensations. The focus on specific details (often flora) orbits a far more personal subtext, and even when the lines run enigmatic and opaque there’s a certain mystical logic to their flow. “The rock and the bone, the buzzards have flown,” goes a line on ‘Flooded’, clear meaning giving way to some instinctual force. “The echoes of home, the echoes of home.”
Elsewhere, things have a clearer narrative. The banjo-led ‘Usnea’ is a quintessential folk song, Hill as narrator dreaming of leaving the bustle of the town she calls home (with “the sirens and the planes and the howling midnight train”) with a loved one. The song ends with a double line that could be taken from a lost classic of any modern era period, a traditional home-is-where-the-heart-is sentiment that’s more country than American primitive. “As you said my darling, one day we’ll get out of this town / and I’d say my baby, I’d go anywhere with you around.”
But time and again Hill returns to draw from the land around her, displaying not only a knowledge and appreciation for nature but a sense of its fundamental importance that transcends its beauty. There are matters larger than aesthetics at work here, because the wax and wane of mother nature is the wax and wane of all things. To key into these patterns is to get closer to something. Something to do with the concept of home and the passing of time. Something to do with life itself.
The blooming thistles and lupine waves
along the hillside of verbena and sage
and the quiet plays on and on
down in the valley of river stone
with a burning hue to her glow
you know it well
wild home
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Azalea is out now and you can get it from the Dear Life Records Bandcamp page.