Living in West Yorkshire, Georgia is a musician performing as HerOrangeCoat. With her ukulele in hand and influenced by her life experiences to date, she weaves a rich tapestry of sound, turning melancholy into an enticing musical journey.

HerOrangeCoat has just released her second EP, The Woodland Sessions, as part of a project funded by the NextGen Fund from Youth Music. Written and played in the sites that inspired them, each in a single day, HerOrangeCoat’s songs tell the stories of five distinctive woodlands and her experiences there.

We had the joy of chatting to HerOrangeCoat about how Yorkshire’s landscapes influence her music, which folklore tales she enjoys the most and where her love for music comes from.

Northern Folklore Archive: Has music always been a large part of your life? Did you enjoy creating sounds as a child, or did it develop more as an adult?

HerOrangeCoat: A huge part of my life, always.

Growing up I was incredibly privileged to have regular music lessons, and around my teenage years I started expressing my emotions through my own songwriting. It would be block chords on the piano and incredibly cliche lyrics, but it was self-expression, and that was crucial.

From there, I haven’t stopped - music is the way I process and deal with things. It became my coping mechanism, a fundamental part of my life. Folk music specifically is something I slowly came to over time. My current sound has been a slow development after getting a ukulele four and a half years ago. It’s a continuous journey.

High five for being from Yorkshire! Best county in the world, of course (totally biased). Do you feel that the landscape of Yorkshire plays a big part in your musical process and projects?

For sure! Nature is a huge aspect of my work, both in terms of the visual and sonic landscape, and so coming from somewhere where we have such good access to the beautiful countryside has been a major influence for me.

I often go for hikes round about the four counties of Yorkshire, particularly North and West (where I’m from), and the amount of times it has led to inspiration in one form or another is impossible to count. Esholt Woods has been a particularly significant spot for me, providing inspiration for multiple projects.

We’re incredibly lucky in Yorkshire - we’ve got countless atmospheric woodlands and lots of stunning moors, although the moorland my mind keeps being drawn back to is actually Saddleworth Moor, which is in Greater Manchester. They’re haunting moors. I know there’s a song there.

Your most recent project The Woodland Sessions was inspired by five woodland locations and their accompanying folklore. It's absolutely beautiful, both the music and the project as a whole! Did you learn any interesting folk stories from the areas you visited, and which is your favourite?!

Yes! So many! From a dragon eating parkin and getting its teeth stuck (and then being drowned), to the Yorkshire version of Rumpelstiltskin (Habetrot and Scantlee Mab).

In terms of favourite, the ones that stuck with me were the darker ones, so I’m not sure favourite is the right term. There are multiple stories of girls’ decapitated heads being put into yew trees, and their dark hair growing into the bark, so that their head could not be retrieved by their families. It is said that yew trees have stripes in the bark, and this is the memory of the hair.

In West Yorkshire Folk Tales by John Billingsley, it’s a hermit who beheaded this girl. He had watched her grow up, but when he confessed his love to her she was horrified, and so the violence unfolds. It’s a horrific story. Another version was simply of a girl not listening in church and the priest gets so angry the same decapitation occurs. I was fascinated and disgusted by the role of women in these stories as passive victims only, or even worse: just simply plot devices. So when I found a yew tree, I tried to feel connected to these women and their stories. I tried to centre these figures, and it was one of the most emotional acts throughout the duration of the project.

There were more comical ones, stories where ‘favourite’ applies so much better. One was of a horseback chase by the witch. The pursued party got to a river and leapt over with his horse. The witch struck the back of the horse, so that it was cleaved in half. The front half of the horse carried on, right to the other side, delivering this very fortunate man safely to upon the bank. The horse wasn’t quite so lucky in this one.

Does folklore inspire much of your songwriting process?

Nature has been a bigger inspiration than folklore in the past. In fact, folklore hasn’t played a large role in my song writing until The Woodland Sessions. For this project, though, I did a lot of research on the folklore of multiple sites across the north of England, and the folklore that was available for each site helped shape where I decided to go. It then fed into my songs in varying ways.

For Down Where the Stories Grow (Garbutt Wood), the entire premise of the song is centred in the folktale, which denotes that Gormire lake below the woods should be black (it was green when I went). Under the Yew Tree (Castle Eden Dene) is about the yew tree stories above, but also more broadly women in folktales, so the commentary is much wider than the stories that inspired it. For the final song of the EP, Adder Stone (Dalby Forest), I didn’t actually refer to any folklore - this one is centrally about my family memories in the space and the process of growing up.

I wrote it in Dalby Forest, which is only a century old and which I couldn’t find folklore for. There used to be forest there in the distant past, but it was gradually cut down for farmland before being retransformed into woodland following a wartime need for timber. I don’t know if the folktales of the woods disappeared with the trees. I certainly hope not, but I couldn’t find anything myself. If anyone does know any stories from the area please do let me know! I’d be fascinated to hear them!

Lastly (and I'm asking this to everyone) one of the Northern Folklore Duo is a huge film fan, so this question is purely for him... what is your favourite film?!

I’m definitely the wrong person to be asking this to. I’m well-known amongst friends and family to really struggle to sit through an entire film.

I did, however, really enjoy the two new(ish) Dune films. They really captured my imagination, and the soundtrack is incredible. It’s the sort of film I watch and I just want to climb into that world (no matter how brutal that world is).

We loved chatting to HerOrangeCoat, and her music is truly beautiful. Please go give it a listen, you can catch her on -

Bandcamp: https://herorangecoat.bandcamp.com/album/the-woodland-sessions

Her Website: https://www.herorangecoat.com/

Instagram: @herorangecoat

Folk Musician: HerOrangeCoat

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Folk Musician: HerOrangeCoat

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Kym Deyn: Writer, Poet & Publisher