“Estival”… a folk music celebration of summer, featuring Emily Mae Winters + Kirsty Merryn + Kitty Macfarlane
EMILY MAE WINTERS’ haunting folk songs are quickly permeating the folk and song writing scene. Influenced by the likes of Nancy Kerr, The Unthanks, Kate Rusby, Gillian Welch, Sarah Jarosz and Alison Krauss, Emily teamed up with BBC Radio 2 Folk Award winner Ben Walker to produce her first commercial EP release ‘Foreign Waters’ which was received with critical acclaim. Her self-penned track ‘Anchor’ from the release won the folk category in the Guardian Songwriting Competition. The tracks have received extensive national and international folk and Americana radio play including support from the BBC RADIO 2 Folk Show with Mark Radcliffe. After spending the last year opening for top UK folk acts including Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker, Philip Henry and Hannah Martin, Adam Holmes and the Embers, Jim Moray and Hannah Sanders and Ben Savage and performing a well-received club tent set at the Cambridge Folk Festival, Emily is just about to release her debut album. Building on the substantial success of her first EP, Foreign Waters, released in July 2016, her debut album ‘Siren Serenade’ will be released in April 2017. The record is being co- produced by BBC Radio 2 Folk award winner Ben Walker (musical partner to Josienne Clarke) and Lauren Deakin- Davies (Laura Marling).
KIRSTY MERRYN is a London-based singer-songwriter whose music is heavily anchored in the folk tradition, with influence from her background in jazz and classical music. Kirsty has become a regular on London’s folk scene, delighting the crowds with her delicately introspective piano based songs and sophisticated musical style, which are balanced beautifully by an intimate and finely observational lyrical content. In 2015 Kirsty joined award-winning singer-songwriter Jack Harris on the main stage at Shrewsbury Folk Festival. In 2015 after being discovered by Steve Knightley from Show of Hands she received national airplay on BBC Radio 6 Music and in 2016 opened the main stage at Sidmouth Folk Week for headliners Show of Hands. Kirsty is currently working on her debut album, a collection of stories about inspirational women, with funding from the English Folk Dance and Song Society, and produced by award-winning Gerry Diver (Sam Lee, Lisa Knapp, The Speech Project), which will be released in 2017. The album will also feature the talents of award-winning musicians Steve Knightley and Luke Jackson.
KITTY MCFARLANE is a Somerset-based singer and songwriter. Her lyrics combine honest snapshots of everyday humanity with the bigger questions that have connected minds and voices for centuries. Kitty’s songs are charged with a sense of place – more often than not her home of Somerset. Mankind’s transactions with the planet, whether those of small French fishing communities, or colossal nuclear power stations, work their way into her songs, alongside a deep interest in shared human experience. As well as the release of her debut EP Tide & Time, the last year or so has taken Kitty on national support tours with Kathryn Roberts & Sean Lakeman, and Blair Dunlop. Tide & Time received outstanding reviews and national airplay on the BBC Radio 2 folk show as well as other regional BBC radio shows across the UK, and features Sam Kelly (co-producer), Jamie Francis, Lukas Drinkwater, Ciaran Algar and others. Kitty was a BBC Young Folk Award semi-finalist in 2015.
