Kirsty Merryn is one of the most arresting and unconventional new young singer songwriters on the UK folk roots scene, with a style uniquely her own. London-based, New Forest-born Kirsty will launch her debut album She and I at London’s Union Chapel on November 9 whilst supporting Show of Hands on their extensive UK Cathedrals tour. Kirsty has been championed by Show of Hands’ frontman Steve Knightley after he met her while teaching at an EFDSS songwriting retreat for upcoming folk singer songwriters and she went on to open for Show of Hands at their headline appearance at Sidmouth Folk Week last year. Beguiling and mercurial, Kirsty’s music is heavily anchored in the folk tradition with jazz and classical backwaters. But it has a much wider reach, with her influences ranging from Cara Dillon to Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush - emphatic piano-based songs with sharply observed lyrics, packaged with panache in elegant, beautifully balanced settings and delivered in crystal clear, assured vocals. Skilfully produced by in-demand, award-winning Gerry Diver (who also plays myriad instruments), She & I comprises eight Merryn originals, focusing on the diverse stories of inspirational women in history, from Emma Hamilton to Annie Edson Taylor – the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive! The narrative songs include the spellbinding Forfarshire about lighthouse keeper’s daughter Grace Darling and her heroic rescue of shipwrecked mariners. She is joined on the haunting song by Steve Knightley in fine voice while BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards double nominee Luke Jackson also guests on the album, with another outstanding vocal in the soaring, dark and dramatic story of a Biblical downfall, Delilah and Samson. The attention-grabbing opening song The Pit and The Pugilist puts Kirsty herself in the frame as the great-great granddaughter of Tommy Mitchell, a miner and boxing champ from Derbyshire. Tempo and style changes to something reminiscent of a New Orleans funeral procession in the sparse, spiritual and percussive Bring up the Bodies which was inspired by Jessica Mitford who wrote an influential book on the American burial system and which Kirsty dedicates to Henrietta Lacks – the African-American whose cells, taken from her body without her knowledge in the Fifties, became one of the most important tools in medical research. The jaunty, tick tock of The Fair Tea Maker of Edgware Row is an upbeat, wry song about the fatally attractive Emma Hamilton and her love triangle of husband Lord Hamilton and lover Admiral Nelson. Kirsty’s research also unearthed the story of Victorian spiritualist and artist Georgiana Houghton who believed she was channelling the talents of those including the Angel Gabriel in her ‘spirit drawings’.The resulting song is the swirling theatrical brushstrokes of An Evening at Home in Spiritual Séance. Queen of the Mist is a song inspired by the amazing story of 63 year-old grandmother Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, with slick piano playing from Merryn. The album ends with the avian-laced soundscape of The Birds Are Drunk – a suspenseful murder ballad about an anonymous woman – rounding off this impressive debut album of original material from an artist who is totally treading a singular path.