We featured Brighton-based songwriter Yoshika Colwell on several occasions in recent times. The EP There’s a Time offered “a sound subtle yet vivid and rooted in the classics of the folk genre,” we wrote, exploring themes of tension and release to champion the sometimes necessary, enlivening act of letting go. Then late last year Colwell teamed up with The Vernon Spring (London composer and producer Sam Beste) for a collaborative EP, taking an intuitive, improvisational approach to push the folk sensibilities in unexpected directions. “I sang without letting my analytical mind get in the way,” Colwell explains. “The words came out like in a conversation or thought, complete with strangeness and non sequiturs and contradictions.”
Now Yoshika Colwell has returned with ‘Last Night’, her first new music of 2025 and a continued development of her style. Pushing the folk sound into ethereal, almost cosmic territory, the song again embraces the satisfying weirdness of dreams, where logic might not adhere to the ordinary laws of such things, yet feels like logic all the same. “I wrote this song in about half an hour sitting alone in my caravan thinking about a dream I’d had the night before,” Colwell explains. “Moments of this kind of fluidity are so rare but it kind of just flowed out of me. The truth of my subconscious mind rose to the surface, through all the mental mess & clutter and out through the song. It was one of the first songs I’d written for a long time that went towards what I was scared to articulate instead of obscuring it with metaphor or abstract, image based lyrics.”
Watch the video by Tilly Wace below:
‘Last Night’ is out now via Blue Flowers and available from the Yoshika Colwell Bandcamp page.
Photo by Tilly Wace