Deep in the online archive of the National Library of Wales sits a ballad about an old man out walking in the woods. In the trees he hears what he takes for birdsong, a song so pure that it sends him to sleep. When he wakes and walks home, three hundred and fifty years have passed. Strangers live in his house, the world he left has changed beyond recognition, and the singer in the trees turns out to have been an angel. Cerys Hafana found the song there and built her new album, Angel, around it. It is a fitting story for her. The harpist from Machynlleth spends her life waking old Welsh songs from that same archive and bringing them home to a world that has moved on: on the triple harp, through muted strings and electronics, and now with a band of double bass, alto saxophone and drums.
Outside St Matthias Church in Stoke Newington, a few hours before those songs filled its Gothic arches, she had a small surprise of her own. As the volunteers arrived to set up the venue, one after another stopped to cheer her, and she answered each of them warmly, visibly taken aback to be so well known in London. We sat down with her there on that mid-October afternoon, nine dates into a tour of around twenty-five. We talked about the angel, the harp, and a year that brought her two albums in four months.
Angel came out on 26 September on tak:til, the imprint of Glitterbeat, and was soon named the Guardian’s folk album of the month. It arrived only months after Difrisg, a set of original piano pieces that had sat waiting for its moment. “I had recorded the piano album and it was all ready to go this time last year, but I didn’t actually manage to release it until June. There was a lot of behind-the-scenes slowness, as with everything. And in the meantime I went to record this other album.”
Angel was made the opposite way to everything she had done before. “With my other albums, I wait until I have all the pieces and then I book the studio time. This time I knew I needed to record an album in January, because of this tour. So I had to work backwards. I booked the time in, and I had a vague idea.” The hardest part was finding the people to play it. “The writing of the album took less time than finding the musicians to record it. There were a few months of that, and then we went to record it in January.” The record was cut live over four days in producer Owain Fleetwood Jenkins’ studio in Pembrokeshire, with Ursula Harrison on double bass, Amie Huckstep on alto saxophone and Lisa Martin on drums.
At first she wanted no theme at all. “I wanted it to be even less of a concept album than Edyf, my last harp album. I just had a lot of different weird folk songs that I liked that had no connection to each other, and I was trying to work out a way of bringing them all together.” Then, only months before the sessions, the angel turned up in the archive. “I just loved the song so much. It was so long that it made sense to split it in half and make two songs, and then it made sense to build an album around that story, with some things I already had and some new things written knowing that this was the concept.”
The story ended up pulling together more than the album. Her output had swerved between the harp records, the piano pieces and The Bitter, an EP of English-language folk songs released in 2024. “I made that all during lockdown and self-produced it, so there are lots of scratchy, weird sounds and strange instruments. With Angel, it includes all of those elements. It’s got the harp, it has the piano, it also has the weird, spooky sounds. I’ve just got other people to play those instruments much better, and do it live. It wasn’t the plan, but when I sat down and looked at the album once I’d finished it, I was relieved, because it does actually make sense with everything.”
It also brought her to a label for the first time, after years of releasing everything herself. “I have the same agency in the UK as Brìghde Chaimbeul, who’s on Glitterbeat as well, so I think there was a connection there. They saw me at WOMEX but didn’t get in touch immediately. Then they came to my gig in London in January and asked what my plans were. And I said, well, actually I recorded a new album a week ago, so this is perfect.” She had meant to put this one out herself too. “But I was feeling quite tired by that whole process, and it didn’t offer a new experience. In the end it felt completely right to try a new way of doing things.”
For an artist so often described as an archivist, she is cheerfully honest about how far the digging goes. “I think I’m a bit cheeky with that, because it looks like I do a lot of research. It’s quite surface level. Usually I just find the songs in the archive, and I do that online, because the National Library has digitised its database of ballads and songs. But then I’m really bad at looking any further. I don’t really look into when the song was written, where it was written, who it was written by, what certain words mean. I just go with my first impression, and then usually I Google it three years later and go, oh, this is all completely different to what I imagined.”
The piano, for now, has gone quiet again. “I went through quite a big piano phase when I made that album, but I think I scratched that itch. I find the piano very weird to play live. I was classically trained on the piano, and there’s a lot of stress and tension that comes with that training. Whereas I did folk on the harp. I’m not as technically good on the harp, but I’m much more relaxed, and I think that makes me a better performer, because I can be expressive.” The difference is built into the instruments themselves. “The harp feels very direct. Your hands are on the strings and there’s no mechanism between you and how you’re making the sound. The piano is like a big machine, and sometimes it feels like it comes with this pressure for you to also be a machine and be perfect.” Not that she always resists. “I did a gig last night in Sheffield, and when we arrived there was a Steinway on the stage. So I thought, well, it’s there.”
This tour has also broken a long stretch of playing alone. “I’ve pretty much only played solo, especially in the last year, just me and the harp, with a laptop doing some backing tracks to get some different sounds. That was fun, but it’s a lot of time to spend in your own head. It’s kind of sad going off stage and not being able to talk to someone else about how it went, someone who was in it with you.” Split into five chunks, the tour brings the album’s musicians in and out in different combinations. Stoke Newington was the fifth night as a trio with saxophone and drums, after four dates with the double bassist the week before. “It doesn’t really feel like the ninth gig, because you kind of start again with the new musicians, and that’s really nice. It’s fun to try and reimagine the pieces for different setups. It keeps things fresh. And it’s just nice to get to look at people on stage.”
The solo harp still gets its moment in every set, and the band changes less for her than for the audience. “I’m always imagining that I’ve got a drum kit on stage when I’m playing. So when there is one there, it doesn’t feel that different to me. But I can imagine it’s quite a different experience for the audience, especially in a big church.” The writing stays solitary. “I like to be completely alone for that part. Everything I write can be performed alone, and it’s always important that it feels good to perform it alone. I don’t sit and write with manuscript paper, I play it, so the performance is part of writing the piece.” Angel was different only in how early the other voices arrived. “With this album, the other instruments and the roles they could play were in my head from quite an early stage. I knew what I needed and what I wanted, and I just had to imagine it for three months before I could make it happen.”
Some of what she imagined came from well outside folk. “I don’t listen to a lot of jazz, but there are certain jazz pianists who have made albums that don’t feel very jazzy, with the same instrumentation, a piano trio doing something slightly different harmonically to what you’d expect. I found that quite inspiring for this album, the textures of the drum kit and the double bass. Maybe more than folk musicians, that felt like the angle I wanted to come from, even though it’s not the world I’m from at all.” That openness is part of why the Glitterbeat home suits her. “I know world music is a complicated term and genre, but I really like being part of that. It often means people who are doing something a bit different with whatever world they’re from. Whereas if you say folk music, and especially Welsh folk music, people have quite a specific idea of what that means. So I feel very honoured to be included, especially with Glitterbeat.”
Abroad, the harp and the language meet audiences who have little idea what they are hearing. In Wales the harp is everywhere. Elsewhere it stops people in their tracks. “People are often quite shocked by the harp, and that’s all they can see. It’s strange as a Welsh person, where the harp is the most common instrument, to go abroad and have people say, oh my god, you must be from the heavens. That’s kind of odd, but quite cool.” The language draws even stranger guesses. “I did a tour supporting Charlie Cunningham, an English singer-songwriter who’s quite big in Germany, in April, mostly in Germany, a bit of France and the Netherlands. I made a list of all the languages people thought I was singing in. They’d come up to me at the end and ask, was it Kazakh, or Arabic? No one said Welsh. I didn’t realise how few people knew about Welsh outside the UK. But it also makes me feel quite cool. The thing people think I am the most is Icelandic, which makes me laugh. I think it’s mostly because of how I look.”
After London the tour runs on until the middle of November, and beyond that she has nothing planned, apart from a running joke. “I’ve been joking that I’m going to try and do a guitar album, because I’ve had to take my harp on an aeroplane a few times this year and it’s been a really bad experience. But I’m really bad at the guitar.” Asked how she would introduce her music to the crowd about to file into St Matthias, she borrows someone else’s words. “Someone once described it as sad Welsh harp pop, which I think is very funny. But at least for the songs, I think that does sum them up. There is a pop music language that I’m using, and it’s sad, and it’s harp, and it’s Welsh.”
Angel is out now on tak:til/Glitterbeat Read our earlier Musical Road to WOMEX episode featuring Cerys Hafana and find her latest news and live dates at ceryshafana.com
Cover Photo ©: Abby Poulson