Polly Paulusma heading to Cambridge for hometown gig

Cambridge resident and seasoned musician Polly Paulusma is to perform at The Portland Arms this evening (Thursday, 6 March).

Wildfires, the sixth studio album from the English singer-songwriter, was released on 28 February.

The album has been described as “mellow and cosy in its production, but its honesty is bittersweet – an intimate and reflective rumination on love’s many guises, the easy parts as well as the hard”.

Polly, who teaches songwriting and poetry for the University of Cambridge, explains: “It is a long body of work, far longer than I expected, coming in at 19 songs.

“I won’t hear all this talk that we can’t concentrate for more than 30 seconds. We sit down and binge on box sets for hours, compulsively.

“We can handle long form. I tried so hard to edit the list of songs down to a more manageable size as I started working with producer Ethan Johns.

“But how to choose? I wanted Ethan to hear all the options so that he could pick the strongest candidates. And I had been writing.

“I wrote the vast majority in a sweaty fury between October 2022 and May 2023, and they have the feel to me of objects forged in fire.

“I sent him 22 songs in a jumble, like a big bag of socks, unfolded, unsorted, I didn’t know an order, but I did know this collection of songs was an emotional map of some recent painful jostling, written in my own blood as Joni would have it.

“They really hurt to make, but it was a good hurt, like pulling out a splinter. Writing them may have saved my life, who knows.

“I expected a song cull when I gave them all to Ethan. I thought he’d listen and trim it down to 10, 11, 12 songs. Normal album length.

“But he could hear my story in them, and he championed fervently the idea that we record them all. He ordered the songs to create the journey which you will hear.

“I remember him reading the list to me over the phone and all the hairs on my arms stood up.

To be seen by this huge empath blew my mind. He saw and understood the journey I had undertaken. These are songs I probably could not have written 20 years ago.

“I just didn’t have enough miles on the clock. And it took Ethan to see what I had.”

Tickets for Polly’s show tonight are priced at £17.10 and are available from theportlandarms.co.uk/wp/. For more on Polly, go to pollypaulusma.com.