Sarah Birch’s “The Ballad of Peter and Jane” Returns Six Years Later
Sarah Birch released “The Ballad of Peter and Jane” into a Swansea that, in early 2019, briefly felt like it had stumbled into its own strange little cultural moment.
The city was full of occupied rooms, overlapping scenes and artists appearing from directions nobody had really mapped out yet. Somewhere in the middle of that came a concept album built with the Mavron Quartet and string arrangements by Sebastian Goldfinch, later nominated for the Welsh Music Prize, which quietly found its way into people’s lives and tended to stay there.
Then everything lurched sideways for a few years and the record inevitably got buried underneath it.
Six years on, Death Monkey Records has remastered the album and added three tracks written during the same period that never made the original release, but now feel difficult to separate from it.
Records that tie to a time and place still make people talk about slightly differently when they realise you were there too.
“The Ballad of Peter and Jane – Anniversary Edition” is out now on Bandcamp and streaming platforms everywhere except Spotify, who remain politely uninvited on this one.
The Ballad of Peter and Jane – Anniversary Edition on Bandcamp
