Debra Cowan
Album: Among Friends
Label: Muzzzy House
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.debracowan.com

Based in Boston, Massachusetts, Debra's one of those artists who tours the UK on a regular basis yet gets surprisingly little press, unassumingly relying on a devoted band of followers for attendance at her gigs - which are nevertheless normally full to capacity. Not only is she an excellent singer, with a clear tone and pure focus to her voice (which I've often compared to that of Joan Baez in those respects) and a keen sense of reserve power beneath that accommodating vibrato, but also her own guitar accompaniment is a model of taste and restraint. She's an entirely natural, engaging performer, who involves an audience straightaway with her song introductions and keeps them in thrall while she's singing. It's that winning intimacy that ensures folks will return to see Debra again and again, and although this special quality has been well communicated on her three CDs to date, it could be argued that on her latest release, Among Friends, the essence of Debra's appeal as a live performer and interpreter of song is even more effectively brought home (so to speak).

The album presents eleven tracks recorded a couple of Novembers back, at a typical live gig: typical in respect of the nature and brilliance of Debra's contribution, her acute attention to fascinating detail, and of the easy rapport she thus attains with an audience. The venue was a folk club very special to Debra, a kind of "home-away-from-home": the famous Bacca Pipes club in Keighley, West Yorkshire (which justifiably boasts of its exceptional resident singers). It's my own favourite folk club, and so although I wasn't able to be there myself that night, I can attest to the accuracy of the recording in capturing both the warmth of Debra's personality and the unique ambience of this club, where Debra is quite literally "among friends".

The range of material that's been chosen for extraction from the sets Debra performed that night is a canny one, firstly in that it forms a representative across-the-board sample of songs she's collected on her travels back and forth across the pond and secondly it gives us permanent recordings of songs she's not hitherto recorded on previous CDs (always a fortuitous and welcome gambit in my book). Having said that, the disc's bookending tracks are both fresh new renditions of traditional songs that Debra's recorded before; here she sets out her stall with an especially persuasive a cappella take on Darling Cory. For the remainder of the set, Debra treats us to a healthy range of mostly very little-known repertoire, with contrasts aplenty taking us from the beautiful Danny Carnahan song The Rose You Wore For Me to the fun celebration of Good Fish Chowder (complete with gleeful "operatic" audience participation on the refrains!); from the powerful social commentary of Carpal Tunnel to a pair of stirring narratives (The Dreadnought Mutiny and The Great Fast Food Strike). The set standout, Debra's highly inspired pairing of the intense Kipling/Bellamy setting My Boy Jack and John Conolly's poignant Widowmaker, is here aptly followed by the folk-anthem One More Before We Go (another from the underrated pen of Mr Conolly, this time with his writing partner Bill Meek).

Of course, this selection - although an ideal gig-memento in its own right - is also but an appetiser, one which should prompt swift recourse to Debra's upcoming gig-list in an attempt to go see her at the earliest opportunity.

David Kidman