The Kindness of Returning – A Weird Walk Through Songs That Carry Us Home

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Lift the Latch. A garden gate lifts, clicks, and swings. Boots meet a damp path. Somewhere nearby, a blackbird tries one clear phrase after the rain.

That is where The Kindness of Returning begins: not at a monument, a haunted ruin, or a place marked on a tourist map, but at an ordinary threshold. The route in this podcast mix is an imagined sound-walk. It leads through rain and fields, towards open water, and eventually back to the garden. Its landmarks are songs.

Many of those songs carry difficult things. There is parting, betrayal, grief, rural loss, and the pull between leaving home and staying put. There are old warnings and uncanny broadcasts. There are figures at the edge of the field and voices that seem to arrive from another time.

Yet, this isn’t a journey into darkness for its own sake. We are listening for what shelters life inside these sounds: self-respect, endurance, friendship, curiosity, and the knowledge that weather changes.

What If a Haunting Is Asking for Care?

We often treat haunting as a threat. But a haunting can also be a form of unfinished attention. It may be a memory that has not found its proper resting place, a warning that still has something useful to say, or a fragment of the past waiting to be heard differently.

Traditional songs are especially good at holding such things. They allow sorrow to take a recognisable shape. Once it has a melody and a human voice, it can be carried and shared. That does not make the pain picturesque, and it does not turn every inherited story into historical fact. It simply gives us a way to stay present without being overwhelmed.

Anne Briggs opens the path with “The Snow It Melts the Soonest”, a Northumbrian song documented in the early nineteenth century. Its winter imagery frames pride, parting, and anticipated return. For this walk, the important movement is the thaw. Cold feeling is real, but it is not permanent. The wind begins to sing, and the landscape changes.

Bert Jansch’s “Black Water Side” takes us to a more vulnerable meeting place. Beauty and hurt sit beside the same water. We do not need to romanticise betrayal to recognise the strength of the voice that survives it.

Pentangle’s “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme” offers another kind of protection. The botanical symbolism belongs to a long family of warning songs, but its message still feels immediate: guard your time, trust your judgement, and do not let another person diminish what is growing in you.

Strange Transmissions and Open Doors

The electronic pieces alter the weather of the walk. Broadcast and the Focus Group build “The Be Colony” from voice, tape, rhythm, echo, and recovered fragments. It feels uncanny, but also playful. A collection of partial signals becomes a temporary commons.

Broadcast’s “Lights Out” lets our eyes adjust rather than closing the world. Comus’s “The Herald” opens a long clearing in the undergrowth. Pye Corner Audio places a steady pulse beneath the clock, while the Advisory Circle’s “New Dimensions In” treats the passing seasons as an opening rather than a loss.

These recordings do not reproduce the past. They rearrange its textures. Public-information voices, analogue electronics, acoustic instruments, and studio residue become material for new acts of imagination. Memory is not a sealed room. It has doors.

The Shore, the Valley, and the Field

At the water’s edge, June Tabor’s “The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry” brings a Northern Isles ballad of love across boundaries. The sea keeps its distance, but it also keeps moving. The song asks us to consider whether love can recognise difference without trying to erase it.

Lal and Mike Waterson’s “The Scarecrow” stands in the seasonal field. This is not an ancient ritual preserved intact in song, but an enigmatic modern composition from Bright Phoebus. Its unsettling imagery has prompted many interpretations. Here, it becomes a question about care: who tends the crop, who is protected, and who is left exposed?

Then New Model Army carry us through the rain-swept valleys of “Green and Grey”. The song understands that both leaving and staying have costs. It holds attachment to place alongside class, violence, ambition, and the lure of somewhere else. Belonging is not simple loyalty. Sometimes it is the difficult work of seeing a place clearly and still caring what happens there.

Giving Grief Somewhere to Rest

Towards the end of the walk, Shirley and Dolly Collins bring us to “The Unquiet Grave”. In the old ballad, excessive mourning disturbs the beloved’s rest. It is a stern image, but it also contains a gentle truth: grief needs a voice, and it needs permission to loosen its hold.

Remembrance should not trap either the living or the dead. We pause, listen, and continue.

The final path leads into “The Garden of Jane Delawney” by Trees. A garden is never finished. It is made through repeated acts of attention: watering, pruning, waiting, noticing what has returned, and making room for something new.

That is the nurturing heart of this mix. It does not pretend that every landscape is safe, or every inherited song is comforting. It offers something more durable: a way to move through difficult weather with discernment, tenderness, and company.

The gate closes softly. The rain has stopped. The path ends where it began, but the walker does not.

Running Order

1. Anne Briggs — “The Snow It Melts the Soonest (Remastered)”
2. Bert Jansch — “Black Water Side (2015 Remaster)”
3. Broadcast and the Focus Group — “The Be Colony”
4. Broadcast — “Lights Out”
5. Comus — “The Herald”
6. June Tabor — “The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry”
7. Lal Waterson and Mike Waterson — “The Scarecrow”
8. New Model Army — “Green and Grey”
9. Pentangle — “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme”
10. Pye Corner Audio — “On the Clock”
11. Shirley Collins and Dolly Collins — “The Unquiet Grave”
12. Sol Invictus — “The English Dead”
13. The Advisory Circle — “New Dimensions In”
14. Trees — “The Garden of Jane Delawney”