To celebrate Poetry Day 2021, Loah has unleashed the first track from a mini-project of poetry set to music that she created over the course of lockdown. The first single sees Loah set ‘The Body to the Soul’ by Eva Gore-Booth to music, with her stunning vocals accompanied to great effect by delicate piano flourishes.

“I chose The Body to the Soul as it has a very dualistic quality I found beautiful. It’s ethereal, but it’s also a direct conversation between the body and the soul.” explains Loah.

“The body is sometimes playfully, sometimes angrily admonishing the soul for everything that the soul is putting it through: how much work, how much sorrow, how much intensity and contrast. And after all that, the body returns to cruel and indifferent dust while the soul flies on to enjoy eternal life. It’s given me wonderful, if sometimes sombre, perspective in this time.”

While it might seem an unusual course of action to set well-known poems to music it has been a long delayed passion project for the songwriter and actor.

“I have always wanted to do a project like this, but the COVID crisis sped it into existence. When the Arts Council made the COVID relief fund available I decided to park what I was working on and put that towards a mini-album of sorts. I was actually planning to move to the United States the week we went into lockdown, so I found myself like all of us doing 180 about turn of all my plans. As a result I chose a bunch of international poets to give me a feeling of connection to the world! The poets originate from Ireland, the USA and Sierra Leone.”

In an attempt to process the current climate, Loah selected poems written around the timeframe of the last great pandemic.

“The poets chosen were very much writing from the lived experience of these great, existential travails (of the 1920s – the War, Spanish Flu, the impending Depression!), and much solace can be taken today from their elegant processing of and reflections upon the complexities their people were facing,” explains Loah, of her thought-process behind selecting the poems to put to music.

“While the poets I’ve chosen worked and published extensively throughout many decades, I am choosing to centre the series on works specifically published during the 1920s, with two exceptions. Taking the form of the folk song to bring the poems alive connects the past to the present in this most ancient means of storytelling, and certainly brings them alive for me personally.”