The English guitarist, songwriter, and song interpreter Jim Ghedi came to folk music through a side door. He grew up playing in bands and putting on shows at a DIY collective in his native Sheffield, where it was far more common to see an experimental noise gig than an acoustic guitar. A fateful Bert Jansch CD, gifted to Ghedi by an aunt, changed his trajectory. He started to dig into folk-rock groups like Pentangle and Steeleye Span, fingerstyle guitarists like John Fahey, and traditional singers like the Watersons. Before long, he was putting on folk nights at the DIY space.

“There was a bit of a joke at the time, where I was the only one playing like that in that space, and the only one putting on nights like that, and finding people from other cities like to come in and play that music,” he says. “But I was in a music community that was very attentive and wanted to hear it. Whether it was folk, or whether it was fucking thrash metal, they were there to enjoy the experience of listening to someone express themselves.”

Ghedi’s take on traditional music has always been colored by his experiences in that DIY scene. There’s a collision of the ancient and the radically new, of old songs and contemporary meanings, at the heart of all his music. That juxtaposition comes through louder than ever on his fourth and newest album, Wasteland. There’s a reason our man is dressed like Lord Byron on the cover of a record where he almost exclusively plays electric guitar. While his outsider’s approach has largely been embraced by the experimental music world, Ghedi says it can still rankle the trad folk purists.

“In the English folk world, I haven’t really felt welcomed,” he says. “I try not to think about it too much, but I definitely feel like the way that I do this, or the fact that I haven’t come into it from a traditional point of view can kind of ruffle some feathers. It’s like, ‘You haven’t been sat in the sessions for 15 years! You weren’t there when you were 10 years old!'”

Ghedi lived in County Clare, Ireland, during the pandemic, and there he fell into a folk scene that he found more hospitable than the one back home. He sat in at sessions and played a lot of music, but he found that he wasn’t writing much. Wasteland, then, is a document of his return to Sheffield, where the political and social climate shook him out of his Irish reverie. It’s an album marked by apocalyptic imagery and omens of death, with deeply personal original compositions and traditional songs plucked from Northern English working-class traditions. It’s the most adventurous, and most complete, record Ghedi has made yet. Since 2015’s Home Is Where I Exist Now To Live And Die, a fairly traditional fingerstyle guitar album, he’s worked to expand his sound with each release.

“That album was very much just trying to figure out a way of playing a guitar that I really wanted, and then from that, I started incorporating voice,” he says. “I can see a progression from how I started to incorporate my voice on A Hymn For Ancient Land, and then, on In The Furrows of Common Place, really owning my voice for the first time. And now, I’m getting more into what I want to say as a sound, as a whole thing, with these pieces coming together, where I’m not focusing on just one aspect.”

Below, stream Wasteland and read our track-by-track interview.

1. “Old Stones”

You mentioned voice and getting more confident using it. This album starts with your falsetto. Why was it important for you to introduce the record that way?

JIM GHEDI: Yeah, I think the falsetto was really interesting on this album. I started playing around with drop tunings on the electric, and as soon as I did that, it pushed my voice lower, but also higher, because it was a wider range. So I had to kind of get up there.

“Old Stones” was written about a friend who passed away. A really close friend of mine. There was a stone circle that he loved out in the Peak District in Derbyshire, close to Sheffield. And a few days after he died, I went out to that stone circle and just kind of sat there with him, and was remembering him. And when I came back, I had this tuning in the electric, and I just whacked that low string. And what I was trying to sing about, I went to the falsetto. One of the lines was specifically about him, and I noticed my voice went real high to try to express that emotion. But also, the low tuning pushed my voice into a higher register when I wanted to kind of get up there in that emotive way.

As soon as I wrote that, it all just happened. “Old Stones” was written in one sitting after I went out to the stone circle, and after I wrote that, and I was hearing it back, I was just like, “Oh, fuck! My voice sounds like it’s in a different place.” I thought that could be a nice way to have something new, to try to work more on a wider range for my voice, combined with that low, fucking twangy electric guitar shit. And so that’s how that started. “Old Stones” was the first track on there that I was like, “This could be interesting.”

So you wrote on electric, and you wrote very pointedly in that tuning. What about that felt right? Because that’s obviously a bit of a departure.

GHEDI: It covered, on one instrument, a wider breadth of my influences. That sounds really fucking weird, but like, the acoustic guitar is an acoustic guitar. And you can do lots of cool, interesting shit on it. But it fundamentally is going to sound like an acoustic guitar. And I think on this record, I really wanted to try to convey some of my wider influences and a kind of mood that hasn’t been necessarily achieved on the others. And soon as I got that electric and I downtuned it, and that low bass just went whoooom, it just opened up. There were elements of a darker, more gnarly, more doomy sound. I was really into stoner doom shit when I was late teenage, early 20s, and I just like the idea of this falsetto, very sweet, very emotive kind of thing, with something that was really dark and fucking doomy and gnarly. And the electric did that. It covered a lot of bases. It opened up a lot of wider sonic influences that the acoustic guitar just couldn’t do.

Were you thinking about drums at the same time? That’s the other big thing on this record: The loud, crashing, full-bodied drums, which is pretty unusual for stuff in this world.

GHEDI: Yeah, for sure. Again, as soon as I started writing in that guitar tuning on the electric, I just heard these drums. Again, because it opened everything up. I then could hear everything. Big drums, big sound, pushing that boundary just like the electric opened that world up. I thought, “Oh, shit, the drums there could be fucking really big.” They kind of came hand-in-hand with that on some of the songs that I wrote myself. The electric stuff, definitely, I started thinking about big-sounding drums in certain bits, and that dictated the arrangements. And Joe [Danks], who played the drums on the album, me and him worked together first. I had these songs, and [it was just] me and him, for weeks and weeks. When we laid it down in the studio, it was just the electric and the drums.

2. “What Will Become Of England”

This is the same recording that you put out in 2022, right?

GHEDI: Yeah, that’s right.

So, you talked about hearing Harry Cox’s version that Alan Lomax recorded. What struck you about that version the first time you heard it?

GHEDI: I was on the Alan Lomax Archive. I think it was a friend of mine who’d mentioned the archive. I’d never been on there before. There’s so many interesting archival recordings of random singers, and I really was trying to find what was going on in England at that time with Alan Lomax, and hearing where we went. I found some really interesting stuff in the Midlands. There wasn’t anything in Sheffield, around where I live, but I was very, very familiar with Harry Cox’s singing, and I found this recording of him in the pub. He did a bit of an interview after with Alan, and he was chatting about how he couldn’t remember the rest of the song, because some guy was playing a tin whistle while singing it in a pub, and he could only remember those two verses. I kind of like that, because then it’s open to interpretation.

And obviously, at the time, with what was going on politically in the UK, hearing those two verses of just this old guy in a pub complaining about how shit England is, I was just like, “Well, this is classic.” And this still is happening now. Like, you could just be in a pub, and you could hear that conversation tonight, and some old lads just grumbling about it. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool, from that one voice, to make this kind of dystopian, really crazy, chaotic, fucking cry of anguish about how shit this country is?” So yeah, that’s kind of where I went with it. There’s a film in Sheffield called Threads that was done in the ’80s.

Oh, yeah.

GHEDI: I don’t know if you’re familiar.

Yep. That’s such a fucking depressing, brutal movie. Great, though.

GHEDI: It’s great! [laughs] But it’s fucking shocking, and my family’s from Sheffield, so I remember my mom saying how terrified everyone was when that came out, because it Cold War time, and the threat of nuclear bombs was real. When that aired on national TV, people fucking shit their pants. It was seriously scary. So that was the vision, or that was the imagery that I wanted that recording to channel.

I’m curious about your selection process in general, when you decide to do a traditional song, is there something that they have in common that you hear that tells you, “Oh, this might be interesting in my style.”

GHEDI: Yeah, a bit. I have to personally connect to it, I think. I don’t think that’s a rule. You can sing any song you want. You can sing it out of just, you’re inspired by the beauty of the melody and all the rest of it. But for me, I think, especially if you put it on an album, you kind of have to stand up with it and be like, “That was connected to this on a personal level for me.” I can have ideas of my own that might be different. I can bring something to this in a way that’s me, which feels like on that one was definitely there. Sometimes it’s saying something that’s already kind of what I’ve been thinking. Like, finding that was kind of interesting, because I was just like, “What the fuck is going on here?” And everyone was! Everyone was just like, “What the fuck is going on?” And then hearing that connected to that feeling, and those conversations that were going on, so I was like, “OK, right. Well, that’s what’s going on now, so I’m gonna do it.”

There’s a repertoire of working-class narratives. There’s something that being from quite a working-class background myself, in folk,that it’s kind of nice where I come across a traditional song that’s through a narrative of working people. It’s nice when I hear a thing like the “Trafford Road Ballad” at the end of the album. It’s from a narrative that feels important to put into folk music and have it there with everything else. It’s not just prancing around in the fucking meadows. There’s real people who have real lives, still.

3. “Newtondale / John Blue”

The hornpipe is not really a big part of the American folk music tradition. Maybe you can educate me a little bit.

GHEDI: Yeah, it’s weird. These are hornpipes, but they’re played in a way that doesn’t necessarily sound like hornpipes. We kind of messed it around and made it a little bit old-timey, in our own bastardized way. But I picked that tune because I was in Dublin, staying with a friend at their house, and rooting through their records. There was this record that was called English Fiddle Players, and track to track, I kept picking out this one fiddle player, and was like, “Who the fuck is that?” I looked on the liner notes, and it was this guy called Dave Shepherd, who was in Blowzabella. I didn’t really know his stuff, but basically, it was like, “Dave Shepherd, born in Sheffield.” And at the time, it was quite important for me to try to find traditional stuff that was from my neck of the woods.

When I found those tunes, they’re so cool, and they’re so kind of dirge-y and minor-y, I just had to put my head to it. It also felt a bit weird that I just pulled that album out, and there’s this fiddle player from Sheffield. At that time, I was spending months and months trying to find a decent English fiddle tune. A lot of them, I’m not attracted to, because it feels a bit like, “diddly dee dee, diddly dee,” you know. Like, very nice. And I was trying to find something minor-y, and something that had real edge and floor to it. And yeah, hornpipes are in English trad. There’s a lot of hornpipe material in English fiddle music, a lot more than Ireland and Scotland and America. I guess it does go with the English fiddle lilt a bit more, and there was definitely a period of time where there was just shit-tons of hornpipes. When I was looking into English fiddle tunes, there were just so many hornpipes. It was unbelievable, really.

4. “Wasteland”

When we were talking about moving home to Sheffield and trying to transcribe that into music, this must be one that was a part of that, right?

GHEDI: Yeah. There was a journey to the airport from County Clare, a really tired, first thing in the morning kind of vibe. That journey back was on that track, quite a lot. I was actually playing that melody in in the house quite a bit in Clare. And it’s one of the only major, slightly sweet-sounding melodies on it. Normally, I’d kind of shy away from that, but I think everyone around me, including the band, was just like, “Man, that melody is so nice.” And it kind of forced me to not disregard it just because it’s not in a minor key, sounding dirge-y. I got home, and I was like, “Right, just persevere with that melody, and write about that connection between coming home and one experience to the other.” That was very much in that track. There was a collection of poetry I wrote over the pandemic, and there were certain lines that kept sticking out that I wanted to put into a song. And I think that was on there.

Were you bringing in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land at all?

GHEDI:. Yeah, people ask that. No, I actually wasn’t.

With the chorus of “cruel is the way,” and the first line of The Waste Land being “April is the cruellest month,” I thought maybe you were doing that.

GHEDI: Oh, that’s cool. Yeah, no, I really didn’t. I get asked that quite a bit. I was completely unaware. I’ve read that book as well. But yeah, there was no link to that. “Wasteland” was just constantly in my head, about the themes of what I was trying to get at. It was this idea of things breaking down, and of having this strange kind of familiarity but unfamiliarity. Like, you’re kind of lost in this place. You know that it’s there, but it’s different. And “Wasteland” just summed that up, really. But yeah, no connection to the T.S. Eliot.

5. “Just A Note”

This is by Ewan MacColl. I wasn’t familiar with this one, even though I’m a fan of his work. What version did you hear?

GHEDI: I got this version from a recording by Lal and Norma Waterson from the Watersons. It was on a compilation called The Mighty River. It’s basically a discography of all the Watersons’ work, individually and as a group. And there were these live recordings on some of the CDs, and one of them was them two singing this song in an upstairs room in a pub in Hull. And I just kept repeating it. Their version is just so beautiful, because they were sisters, so their voices together on the recording, how blended and how natural it was, is just so nice. It’s about some guy building the M1, which is a road that runs straight through Sheffield. And I use the M1 all the fucking time. It’s a motorway. And it’s a worker who’s away from home, who’s writing this song because he’s missing his family.

You went with just voice and strings. What did you like about doing a stripped-down arrangement for this?

GHEDI: I wanted it to be really basic and live, I guess in the same way as the reference point of that version from Lal and Norma. Neal [Heppleston], who plays bass for me, and Dan [Bridgwood-Hill], who at the time was playing fiddle for me, just really liked the idea of having these sparse strings that are slightly off, slightly live, and slightly wonky, but still together, and almost acting as a bed to push up the emotion of what I was singing. We tried it out a couple of times live, and I was like, “Let’s just do that. No overdubs. Let’s just be in a room and accept what happens there.” It’s a weird mix, because the fiddle and the bass, in terms of frequencies, you wouldn’t normally do that. You wouldn’t put a fiddle with a bass and then be like, “That’s it,” because it’s just a massive leap. But somehow, I think it worked, because of the wonkiness that I was trying to do.

6. “Sheaf & Feld”

The next sound after that song ends is probably the heaviest part of the record: the intro of “Sheaf & Feld.” It’s so heavy and dissonant. Was that juxtaposition intentional, coming out of the quiet part?

GHEDI: Yeah, yeah, I really wanted that. There were conversations at the time where like people were like, “I don’t know, it’s a big jump. I don’t know if you should do that. It’s gonna be too much.” But in my head I was like, “No, that’s exactly what I want there.” For the second side to just hit it, straight after that very quiet moment. That was very intentional for me. I stuck with my guns when there was a bit of pushback with that.

Well, it worked. The apocalyptic atmosphere that I think some of this record has comes through the most for me on that song. Could you feel that happening in the writing, or was that something that came through arrangement and performance?

GHEDI: A bit of both, I think. That song is around death, and it’s pretty dark. In the writing, I knew that that this was going to be really fucking gnarly. And that first chord, which is just a one-note thing, that’s how that song really started. Because I was just really fucking hitting that chord, and it’s just like this one note. I really wanted this big, gnarly fucking sound. And as soon as I did, I knew that once the drums were going to be on it, I could hear these weird strings. I wanted these strings to be gut-wrenching, like some fucking weird horror film, where these things are just happening around you. Really disgusting, scratchy, fucking [imitates horror-movie strings]. To be honest with you, I didn’t really know how that one was going to go in the studio. That was a completely creative-driven idea. And then, when we went into the studio, and things started to go on it, that’s when it really came together. Me and the engineer, we were just laughing. Making choices out of, like, “Fuck, this is ridiculous. Let’s go hard into where we’re laughing at it.”

It must have felt good to realize you had the confidence to pull off something so out-there. Do you feel like you could have done a song like this on a past record?

GHEDI: I don’t think it would have worked on the others. Sonically and musically, I wasn’t pulling from the same place. So no, I don’t. I think it could only really exist on this album. “Sheaf” is really important to me, because it’s an exercise in where things can go. And as a musician, nothing’s really the same for me. I’m constantly driven by a new creative decision, and that can open like a door. And “Sheaf” is something that made me go like, “Oh, right. Well, where the fuck is it going on the next one?” That’s just opened a load of fucking sonic choices, and maybe this goes deeper into something else on the next album.

7. “Hester”

Who is Hester?

GHEDI: Hester was a dog.

I was gonna say it was a dog or a horse. I wasn’t sure.

GHEDI: Yeah, so there was a dog that was missing in the area around where I grew up. And I was doing a lot of walking around there at the time, through the woods and stuff. And then there was this sign that kept coming up everywhere: “Missing dog, Hester, please help find.” And I kind of vaguely knew the guy who’d lost the dog. And everyone was looking around for weeks and weeks, just trying to find Hester. It became, like, a thing. Everyone was just trying to find this dog that was missing. And then, weeks and weeks down the line, it ended up being found, and it was dead. But for me, it was a metaphor for something else. I kind of went to town with what that could symbolize. I just kind of leant into this thing being a metaphor, a symbol for something wider and bigger.

You came up with this idea on a walk. Does spending time in nature play a role in your process?

GHEDI: Yeah, massive. I think on the last two [albums] more than this one. But I find walking and being in nature massively helpful. A lot of the time, with me, it’s been kind of hand-in-hand, where it nurtures my creativity. I might have an idea, and I might be in the house in the city, and for whatever reason, it’s not quite getting there. And then I’m out in nature, and you’ve got time to think. You’ve got time to take in things that surround you, and it tends to be helpful. That was definitely on this album as well. There’s a massive concept of death in this one. The breaking down of a place, but also death, was a huge thing that was constant throughout the album. The metaphor of a black crow, or blackbirds, was also a reference for me that symbolized death. But nature can be a place to find solace, to find help, and to work through and process stuff that people go through. Nature can be a real big tool to kind of help yourself through really shit times.

8. “The Seasons”

The four-part harmony is you, Amelia Baker from Cinder Well, Cormac mac Diarmada from Lankum, and Ruth Clinton from Landless. Did you feel like you were assembling your Dream Team?

GHEDI: [laughs] Yeah, kind of! I was very lucky to be around a lot of talented musicians, and Ruth and Cossie are really good friends. I love them to bits. Again, with that traditional pick, I was again trying to find English ballads, and I found that song from Ken Hall and Peta Webb, who are two amazing English singers. Incredible. I found them singing “The Seasons” on ITMA, which is the Irish [Traditional Music] Archives. You can go online and find loads of shit. And I found them singing this song in a pub in Dublin. And Ken, he’s from like Liverpool, so he’s Northern English as well. And he’s talking to the crowd, and he’s like, “I’ve been trying to find an English ballad that has the same weight as Irish ballads, and I finally found this song. I was singing it the other month, and this Irish lad came up to me and was like, ‘Oh, it’s great that you’ve been singing this song from my great-great-granddad.'” He was like, “Fuck! Just when I thought I had something good!” [laughs] I was like, “OK, cool. I’ll take that.”

Amelia helped me arrange that one. Her voice and my voice together is definitely quite unique. I think it works in a weird way, and we jell together really well. When we nailed the arrangement, me and Amelia recorded that live, and I was sitting with just them two voices, and it was enough. We were both pretty happy with it. But then I just couldn’t stop hearing Cossie’s and Ruth’s voices in the last bit of the song. So I just asked them guys if they were up for doing something, and they recorded it remote and just nailed it. I really love the arrangement, and how they come in on that last bit. It really opens the track up.

Amelia is on this record in a few places, and you’ve worked with her in the past as well. What do you like about working with Amelia?

GHEDI: I think we come from quite a similar place, in terms of where we’re reaching from, in terms of our influences and our backgrounds. She is a very talented person, just in how she can hear an arrangement. She hears an arrangement really quick in her mind. She comes from a similar background, where she’s not coming into it as a trad folk musician. She’s had a similar trajectory, where she’s been playing in punk folk bands, and DIY punk community, and found herself really leaning hard into traditional music. More Irish traditional music, for her, but I feel like our voices, and where we’ve come from, is very similar. Our way into folk music is very, very similar, so our choices and our tastes of where we pull from are very similar. It’s rare to find that in musicians. Similar to Cossie as well. Cossie is from a bit more of a traditional background, but he has such wide influences, and musically, where he pulls from, you’re like, “What the fuck? I would have never fucking come up with that.” It’s good to have those kinds of people on your music. I feel very privileged.

9. “Wishing Tree”

There’s a line that jumped out at me immediately when I first heard this: “We’ve been struggling to cope with our mental health.” To me, that’s such a modern-sounding idea, but you’ve set it against this more timeless world that you’re creating. I’m curious about that choice.

GHEDI: Yeah, there was someone who wasn’t a fan of that line for that reason. It was just very matter of fact. It was almost clinical. It kind of shakes you out of the mystery. But for me, it was important. I wanted to get a bit of that in that song, where it was almost conversational. It was relatable. It’s also such a weird thing to say, because it’s like, “We are struggling with our mental health.” People were like, “Well, you’re just struggling. You wouldn’t say that.” But I was like, fuck it, it’s to the point. So it was definitely intentional to have that song a bit more personal. There are certain lines that are a bit more jarring, that wouldn’t be as imagery-based.

There’s another moment I want to ask about, where everything drops out and goes to silence, and then, when you all come back in, you build to that crescendo. How did that part come together?

GHEDI: Yeah, the end bit, where it’s screaming. I had an idea to snap in on the third there, so you think it’s done. And then you count, and we came in on the third. It snaps in, and it comes in with that high fucking screeching. And I just really wanted to wail. I wanted it to sound like this wailing fucking thing, and just really go for the big crescendo finish on it. Me and Joe, the drummer, we worked out how to snap into that, and it sounded quite snappy. We wanted to kind of shock the listener.

And the way that ends makes the last song, “Trafford Road Ballad,” feel like a coda, the calm after the storm. Was that also intentional, the transition out?

GHEDI: Yeah, totally. There’s a line in “Wishing Tree” where it’s a storm, as well. It’s around the ocean in winter, and these two characters are breaking down. That’s kind of what “Wishing Tree” is about. To me, “Wishing Tree” is tumultuous. You’re in turmoil. It’s all fucking crashing. The waves are crashing, these two characters are crashing. Everything’s a bit fucking mad and chaotic. And then, dipping down out of “Wishing Tree” was very much like you are coming out of a storm. Me and [David] Glover, who was the co-producer, we worked on that sequence. It took quite a bit of time to get that right, because it’s so big. That was kind of tricky, to make the weird sounds that we were doing get into an interval. But I think we did a good job of it.

10. “Trafford Road Ballad”

Earlier, you were talking about specifically drawing on English folk songs that come from a working-class tradition. With “Trafford Road Ballad,” obviously, that comes through. An anti-war song, an anti-imperialist song, from a working-class perspective. How does that resonate with you in the context of what you see in England today?

GHEDI: It’s massively important, I think. For me, the song was so cool because it’s this working-class guy, where the only chance he’s got to travel with his loved one and see the world is to go back into the Army. And it’s him being like, “Well, fuck that. I’d rather stay in Salford. I’d rather stay in this working-class community with my fucking Monday to Friday, industrial job, if that means me having to fucking go and shoot some innocent people.” That song, for me, was wider than the singular character in that singular time. That’s a message that’s so important now, to shout down these things, and challenge colonialism and imperialism, and our history as a country. We all have a choice, in our own fucking way, to shout that down and pull that down. And as a traditional song, for me, that was a thread of that. That’s another narrative that shows how you can make the choices with what you’ve got, and make noise when it needs to happen, and reject colonialism at all costs, and imperialism and militarization. [laughs] Nice little light moment to end.

That was perfect. But, I mean, you did that on purpose. That is the thought that people are leaving the album with.

GHEDI: It’s a nice way to be like, at the end of the album, “Reject the shit out of that, because there’s more to come. Fuck those people who are doing that, at all costs.”

But also, here’s some acoustic guitar.

GHEDI: [laughs] Yeah. Also, here’s some fiddle tunes from Yorkshire.

Wasteland is out now on Basin Rock.