The 2022 Folk Album Written as a Diary, Before The Harbinger in Sheffield and Carmarthen
The studio was a living room in Haringey, north London. Song for Wild wrote and recorded Music Made for Trees there and released it on 20 March 2022. Its eight earthy acoustic folk songs work as a diary. They follow the artist’s life and the people who passed through it.
Song for Wild’s This Is The Place You’ve Chosen sits in the playlist below with our folk and chamber folk picks, and the project’s full run of coverage is collected on the Song for Wild artist profile. Music Made for Trees reached this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news sites. Hear it first, then carry on for the living room it was made in.
In 2020 Song for Wild Decided on an Album Every Two Years, and Music Made for Trees Came First
The decision came before the songs. In 2020, Song for Wild set out to write an album every two years. Music Made for Trees was the first record of that plan. Each album would hold one stretch of the artist’s life, and each song a person or a moment from it. Playing an old track then becomes a way of meeting a past self again.
Take This Is The Place You’ve Chosen, for example. Song for Wild wrote it for and about a man the artist worked alongside as his mental health nurse. The song looks at his place in the world and at how the world answered his struggle. In other words, it is seen by someone who was there for it. Spotify credits the words and music to Christopher Paul Girling, the songwriter behind Song for Wild.
Eight Songs and Thirty-Seven Minutes on Music Made for Trees, From Colour Runs to My Luck
Music Made for Trees runs to eight songs and just under 37 minutes. It opens with Colour Runs, places This Is The Place You’ve Chosen fifth and closes on My Luck. The longest piece, however, is Birds Above Me, at six minutes. House on the Hill comes close behind at five minutes and 41 seconds.
The title shares a line with the project’s own bio. It describes the music as made for trees, bees and bears, and only leaked into the human population by accident. The joke is a fair guide to the record, homespun and personal from first song to last.
IGGY Magazine reviewed the album in May 2022 and picked House on the Hill as its favourite. The European Indie Music Network also featured it. The voice stays soft and close throughout, carried by the songs rather than set above them.
Song for Wild’s Living-Room Folk Sits With Nick Drake’s Pink Moon and Bon Iver’s Cabin Album
Two famous records were made in a similar spirit. Nick Drake recorded Pink Moon over two nights in October 1971 at Sound Techniques in London. Only the engineer John Wood was in the room. It was his third and final studio album, and it runs to just over 28 minutes.
Bon Iver began as Justin Vernon alone in his father’s hunting cabin in Wisconsin. There he recorded For Emma, Forever Ago over the winter of 2006 and 2007, then self-released it in July 2007.
Music Made for Trees belongs to that small family of records shaped by one room and a short list of people. In this case, the room was a north London living room, in place of the studio or the cabin.
What Music Made for Trees Answered, From The Harbinger in Sheffield to Carmarthen and Bristol
At first, the question in 2020 was whether the plan would hold. The Harbinger answered it in 2024 with 11 songs, covering the two years Song for Wild spent living in Sheffield. Georgian Windows, released as a single that year, sits on it. Millowners runs in two parts across the record, and Edith closes it.
Then came Carmarthen, announced at the end of September 2026 as the album that marks the move to Bristol. It has five songs. The last of them, Gaia, runs for 15 minutes and 16 seconds, longer than anything on the first two albums.
So that is what the first album was waiting to learn: the diary kept going, one address at a time. Where 2028 will lead, Song for Wild says only that nobody knows yet.
It suits listeners who want folk that is quiet and personal. It also suits anyone happy to follow one songwriter from album to album as the addresses change.
From the NewMusic.News curator team: “A diary usually keeps its writer at the centre. Music Made for Trees gives one of its songs to someone else, a man its writer cared for as a nurse. That generosity is what stays with us.”
Play Music Made for Trees in the player at the top of this page, then follow Song for Wild on Spotify, X, Facebook and the YouTube channel.
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