Paul Weller’s favourite folk albums
Paul Weller has always been a man who has drawn on many and varied influences, who has always had a wide-ranging taste in music and who has always incorporated so many disparate elements into his own work.
Whether it’s come in the shape of the power-pop punk-rock of The Jam, the soul-inspired sounds of the Style Council or the more sophisticated melange of rock styles across his solo albums, from his eponymous debut to this year’s Find El Dorado, it’s always been clear that Weller is a man of many musical influences.
In fact, it’s even clear just from looking at the songs he’s covered and made his own on Find El Dorado, like Bobby Charles’ best song ‘Small Town Talk’ or The Bee Gees’ ‘I Started a Joke’ and deep cut, crate-digger picks like The Guerrillas’ ‘Lawdy Rolla’.
There is a hint of folk and a blur of the blues across a lot of the songs here, and it’s not the first time in his career that Weller has introduced a folk feeling to his output. Perhaps it was never more notable in his output than on his second solo album, 1993’s Wild Wood.
“There was kind of an Englishness and a folkiness about some of Paul’s writing at that time,” says his friend, The Blow Monkeys’ singer Robert Howard, who remembers Weller sharing his love of Donovan’s 1967 record A Gift From A Flower To A Garden. “The acoustics came out again and we would play those songs together, like ‘Wear Your Love Like Heaven’, and analyse them a little bit. I think that was the beginning of what turned out to be Wild Wood, for him”.
And though he might have been listening to a lot of Donovan at the time, it was another British singer-songwriter with a folk background that many astutely heard as a key influence over the first few Paul Weller solo albums.
Though he is often more associated with an electric sound and set up, Paul Weller has always been a keen fan of Nick Drake, and counts both the tragic singer’s Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter albums amongst his favourite records of all time.
When speaking about what it is about the albums that grab him so much, Weller explained that Drake is “such a one-off, just the sound of his voice and the tunes are very unique”, before adding that “it’s a little bit folk, but it isn’t really folk, there’s a bit of Donovan in there, but there isn’t really. And then I heard a home recording of his mum singing on the piano and thought, ‘Ah, that’s it…’ It must be something in the genes”.
And while Drake was toiling in a more traditional-sounding style in the early 1970s, by the 1990s, Paul Weller was aiming for a more “modern day folk song” feel with Wild Wood. Even more contemporaneously still, no one is really making better modern day folk music than Laura Marling, which likely explains why Weller considers her Once I Was An Eagle amongst his favourite albums, as well.
Explaining why he loves it so much, Weller said that “I think it’s her masterpiece. I’ve liked most of her records but this is just fantastic. The first three or four songs are almost like a suite, they just run into each other. It’s got that dark intensity. She’s a real talent”.
Paul Weller’s three favourite folk albums:
- Five Leaves Left – Nick Drake
- Bryter Layter – Nick Drake
- Once I Was an Eagle – Laura Marling
