Salut! Folk

Andrew Curry: One of the Salut Folk traditions is that we mark New Year’s Day with one or two songs about the turning of the year. Fortunately there are a lot of songs out there that fit the bill. This year—although this wasn’t intentional—we seem to have ended up with three contrasting songs by women performers.

We’ve mentioned Mary Chapin Carpenter a few times on the site over the years, but always in passing, and usually as an influence on musicians that we have been writing about. So it’s good to be able to include a song by her here. Chapin Carpenter is in her 60s now, and still touring and releasing music, which sits in the space between folk music and country music—she’s won multiple Grammy Awards for ‘best Female Country Vocalist’.

I think I came across her first in a Rounder Records sampler in the late 1980s, and her songs are marked by strong stories, vivid phrases, and memorable choruses. New Year’s Day, from her 2012 record Ashes and Roses, certainly does all of this. It’s an ambiguous song about a couple in a bar at the end of the year, and the lyric takes the listener right into the room:

And the front door pulls a draft in
Every time it opens wide
And you are telling me a story
From another time and life.

Checking a detail on another song, I stumbled across Where The Good Times Are, the mid-2010s repackaging of Beverley Martyn’s mid-1960s recordings for the Deram label, a label name that will conjure a flash of recognition, or even excitement, for readers of a certain age.

She wasn’t Beverley Martyn at the time—she didn’t meet John Martyn for another couple of years—and although she’s known now as a folk musician, Deram was clearly trying to position her as ‘Beverley’, and as a blues singer. They didn’t stint on the backing musicians either: pre-Led Zep Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, the pianist Nicky Hopkins, and John Renbourn were all in the studio.

Denny Cordell, who produced the record, also produced The Moody Blues, Joe Cocker, and Procul Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale. Listening to Where The Good Times Are you can’t help but think that if she had stuck with this style (and maybe not met John Martyn) she could have been as famous as Janis Joplin.

Happy New Year—the first single to be released on the Deram label—is a cover of a song written by Randy Newman. The reverb on Nicky Hopkins’ piano is quite something:

I’m a fan of Thea Gilmore, not just because she released one of the best Christmas albums in Strange Communion in 2009; I also mentioned her 2025 record The Quiet Friends in my review of what I have been listening to this year.

But the song we’re featuring by her here was released quite quietly just last week. The Turning is a perfect song for New Year’s Day. It is at once both wistful and optimistic, and her voice and the understated piano arrangement brings exactly the right tone to this.

So to our readers, wherever you are, the Salut Folk! team—editor Colin Randall, deputy editor Andrew Curry, and North America editor Steve Peck—wish you the very best for 2026.

As Mary Chapin Carpenter sings in New Year’s Day,

In dreams or in our waking
It’s just enough to say
Love and grace and endless flowers

Be ours on New Year’s Day

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If you like folk, folk-rock or acoustic music, do visit the Salut! Folk Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/2902595146676633/.