Burn Bright

The Magpies’ take on roots music is among the most incisive we’ve heard in the genre. With ‘Burn Bright’, their affinity for British folk and Appalachian storytelling brings to mind one of the stranger things about going home after a long time away. You can spend years getting used to how people speak in the place you’ve moved to, then hear a familiar turn of phrase on the way back and feel your whole body relax. You might catch yourself using it again before you’ve even got off the train. The words were yours all along. You’d just stopped saying them quite that way. The Magpies are good company for anyone who knows that feeling. The two traditions they draw on have had centuries to develop their own ways of telling a story, and you can still catch a family resemblance across the distance. That resemblance makes me think about what people carry with them when they leave. A song takes up no room and can survive years without anyone thinking to sing it. Then you hear it somewhere you never expected to, and for a few minutes the place you left feels close enough to miss. ‘Burn Bright’ sent me back to that feeling, and to the awkwardness that can come with it. The longer you live somewhere, the more you have to miss when you go back. You’ve picked up words you’d have found strange once. Some of them come to you quicker now than the ones you grew up with. After a while, you stop correcting yourself.