Polly Paulusma follows up her critically acclaimed 2021 album ‘Invisible Music’ with ‘The Pivot On Which The World Turns’ out via One Little Independent folk subsidiary Wild Sound.

Affectionately shortened to ‘Pivot’, the album marks a return to her singular brand of insightful songs that, in their subject matter, roam around the badlands of love, sex and parenthood, death and grief, failure and success, violence and healing. Most poignantly the album focuses on the roles of women, in our lives and across history, from a variety of perspectives.

‘Pivot’ swings from the warm, blues-inspired Americana of ‘Back Of Your Hand’ and ‘Dirty Circus’, to the more traditional folk of ‘Brambles and Briars’ and ‘Robin’, as well as poetic, pop curiosities such as ‘Snakeskin’ and the effervescent ‘Luminary’, all of which combine to make up Polly’s most sonically adventurous album to date. As always, she delights in the telling of stories, with littered spoken word aiding her as she utilizes infectious melodies and a light delivery to explore her characters.

The product of a decade of writing, she tells us that “the album’s title ‘The Pivot On Which The World Turns’ is a corruption of a moment in the Russian novel Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, in which Stepan Arkadyitch knowingly confesses, “women, my boy, they’re the pivot everything turns upon”. In context, Stepan and Levin are discussing romantic relationships, but I saw wider interpretations of this epithet”.

Each track on the LP examines a different aspect of life that women play, and “charts a development for me through all the roles I pivot on in a day, a week, a year, a decade”. ‘Snakeskin’ represents the daughter, ‘Back Of Your Hand’ is the love interest, ‘Dirty Circus’ the mother and so on. “I truly believe, having travelled the last few years, having endured grief and horror and having discovered and pivoted on all these people that I am capable of being, that by learning how to love, and re-learning, and learning again, so many of the wartier and knobblier parts of me can be forgiven, and translated into something better”.