Some people chase novelty for its own sake, but I’ve never been interested in the adrenaline rush of what's new or trending. What moves me more deeply is the quiet thrill of rediscovery—the unexpected moment when something old reveals itself as if for the first time. I try to keep myself open to these small revelations, to let the past surprise me. It’s not nostalgia I seek, but resonance: a sound, a phrase, a feeling that slips through the noise of the present and lands squarely in the soul.
That’s how Mary Skeffington found me.
It came up uninvited on a playlist—Rab Noakes’s voice carrying across the decades with unforced clarity, the simple guitar line catching me off guard. I didn’t know the song, didn’t recognize the name, but something about it made me stop mid-motion. Before the first verse had ended, I was caught. Not in memory, but in something more active: a discovery unfolding in real time, even though the song was recorded in 1971.
“Mary Skeffington, close your eyes / And make believe that you are just a girl again.”
It’s the kind of line that arrests you with its softness. A lullaby spoken across time, not to erase someone’s pain, but to hold it. The entire song is an act of gentle witness. It doesn’t try to fix or explain—it simply sees. A voice singing to someone whose life has grown difficult, reminding her of who she was before the wear of years, before disappointments crept in.
“Go to sleep tonight, dream of days / When you had something there to light the way.”
There’s no false light here, no saccharine sweetness. Just a fragile kind of grace.
After that first listen, I went searching. I fell down the best kind of rabbit hole. One song became two, then three—then the entirety of Demos and Rarities Vol. 2, and beyond. I discovered Red Pump Special, and with it, the song Branch. Where Mary Skeffington is about stillness and memory, Branch is about yearning. It’s the sound of someone in quiet motion, not fleeing, but moving forward with a suitcase in hand and the ache of hope in their voice.
“It’s getting quiet in the forest / Sitting singing the same old chorus…”
The image is simple and unmistakable: the stillness before a change. The sense that one has stayed too long in the same place, emotionally or otherwise. And then:
“Give me a sign / Draw me a line / And show me a branch away from here.”
He doesn’t ask for escape—he asks for a branch. A new direction. A shift in trajectory. It’s not dramatic. It’s honest.
“I think I’ll stuff my cases / And take a look at some other places…”
This isn’t restlessness for its own sake. It’s a soul testing the wind, sensing that there’s more life to be lived elsewhere. That simple urge—to step out, to risk the unknown—echoes in me too. And just like with Mary Skeffington, Noakes makes space for the listener to find themselves inside the lyric. The line is blurred between his song and your life. That’s what folk music does best.
And this is why I love it. Folk music, at its best, doesn’t impose meaning—it offers it. It resists spectacle and honors the small. It makes room for memory, for melancholy, for moments that might otherwise pass unnoticed. I’ve loved it for years, drawn to its warmth and its wisdom, but each time I discover a new voice—someone like Noakes—I’m reminded of just how little I know. How many lives, how many songs, how many sorrows and joys are still out there, waiting.
And how wonderful it is to know how small I am.
How vast the archive of human experience remains.
How much is still left to find.
Listening to Noakes’s voice—spare, melodic, human—I was taken back to the first time I heard Five Leaves Left by Nick Drake. That same quiet astonishment. That same permission to feel more slowly. Music that doesn't announce itself but lingers. Music that seems to know you better than you know yourself.
And yet, even after exploring all I could, I kept returning to Mary Skeffington. It feels like the axis around which the others spin.
“Mary Skeffington, when you wake / You mustn’t be afraid to face another day.”
It’s a simple kindness, sung plainly. But the weight it carries is enormous. The kind of line that says: yes, it’s hard. And still—go on.
By the time he returns to the opening refrain—
“Close your eyes / And make believe that you are just a girl again…”
—it feels not like nostalgia, but like restoration. A way of returning to oneself. A kind of healing that lives in remembering.
Maybe that’s the heart of what keeps me open to these moments of rediscovery. They don’t offer novelty—they offer recognition. They show me what I didn’t know I was carrying. They offer a new line, a new branch, a candle in the dark, a place to rest.
What a comfort, to know the world still holds surprises.
What a joy, to still be surprised at all.
What a quiet miracle, to be met—midway through the day—by a song like this.
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