Bella Hardy is a fine, no-nonsense interpreter of traditional music and an excellent songwriter, and on this album the two modes collide. There are new songs that echo folk songs, and traditional songs reworked to sound contemporary, and they succeed thanks to the quality of her writing. The opening Good Man's Wife, an emotional retelling of the well-worn Raggle Taggle Gypsies, starts with the intriguing line, "I've been loving you like a soldier in the peacetime, waiting for the war." Many of the songs that follow are pained women's stories in which men come out badly. So True Hearted Girl cleverly combines different folk songs to tell the story of a girl dying of syphilis, Through Lonesome Woods is a story of grieving, and Maybe You Might is a sad ballad that could be a contemporary standard. A powerful set, driven on by her own fiddle, piano and four-piece acoustic band.