It’s June in England and it’s raining, because of course it is. I’m in my wingback armchair, headphones in, watching the raindrops trickle down the skylight, thinking about everything that has become too fast and loud and stupid. In my ears – Jenny Gillespie Mason’s debut album under her own name, In the Safety of the Light, is gently displacing my thoughts and carrying me somewhere more solar and less hurried, a California that sounds like the England that existed in the early 1970s in a handful of records, before the music industry moved on and took that moment away from us. Pastoral England is gone yet somehow, its seeds ended up sprouting in Berkeley.
The Canterbury scene gave us Caravan and Soft Machine, a strain of progressive folk that bloomed briefly in the late 60s and early 70s and has migrated to America. Meg Baird has been tending to it and now it resurfaces through Noah Georgeson’s production, the man who made records with Bert Jansch and Vashti Bunyan. Harmonium and their Québécois folk mysticism are on this map too, with their layered organic arrangements and sedate sense of time, music that existed on its own spiritual terms and didn’t care too much about the market it was ignoring.
Jenny Gillespie Mason is also working in this register. After a decade of wilful genre refusal as Sis, she returns to the acoustic guitar and to something that she needed to tackle plainly: motherhood, spiritual practice, the discord of trying to live as a gentle soul through the golden age of noise.
The record opens with ‘Horizontal’ – Mason’s voice bright and candid over acoustic guitar, a flute arriving tenderly behind it. Then, one minute in, a cello enters and pulls everything into a deeper register, though the initial airiness never leaves. This blend of something luminous on the surface and something grounding underneath stays for all eight tracks, aided by immaculate production where every instrument is perfectly levelled, each note given room to shine, and nothing is competing for space. The whole album floats, but there is an underlying weightiness that stops it from drifting away entirely and keeps pulling your attention back to it.
On ‘Medicine of Light’, the guitar and cello meld into something organically interwoven, Mason’s harmonies building in layers above it, each a degree warmer than the last, until you may find yourself somewhere green and serene, where the morning dew is still on the grass and whatever was troubling your thoughts before you pressed play has entirely lost its powers. Lyrics draw on Integral Yoga and the teachings of Mother Mirra Alfassa, and there is a sense of spirituality so deeply embedded in the music’s fabric that if you close your eyes, you may find your body finding its rhythm, healing itself with a wispy, unplanned movement. ‘Rungs of Love’ carries this further. There are words that come from her journals, small observations and private moments made universal, an invitation to detach mind from matter and just be. In the Safety of the Light functions as a container throughout. It has the power to hold you, suspend you, embrace you, while keeping the outside world at a comfortable distance.
‘Woman from Nottingham’ closes the record with Mason at the Wurlitzer, stripped back and exposed, no guitar, the space around her voice wider and more vulnerable than anywhere else before; it lands like a held breath finally released. A professor gathers her students on the grass hours after the towers fell and tells them to put away their books, to find comfort in each other, and pay attention to how incessantly the world keeps producing beauty. In 2026, this delicate song is an act of resistance: look at each other and notice the grace in every detail. That’s the only sane response to anything. I look up, and the rain is still there. So is everything else around me. The world can wait.
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