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Welsh singer Mary Hopkin set to release new album

28 Apr 2023 2 minute read
Credit: Mary Hopkin

Welsh singer Mary Hopkin is set to release a brand new album, alongside her daughter Jessica Lee Morgan.

Hopkin, best known for her number one hit ‘Those Were The Days’, competed in the 1970 Eurovision Song Competition and came 2nd with ‘Knock, Knock, Who’s There’.
She lost out to Ireland’s 32 votes to Dana’s ‘All Kinds Of Everything’.
The long-awaited album of duets, ‘Two Hearts’, will be released on May 3rd – Mary’s birthday.
Having sung together at home and on each other’s albums, Mary and Jessica have finally committed to an album of their favourite covers and some new jointly-written and performed songs.

The mother and daughter duo learned some covers together back when Jessica got her first guitar as a teenager.

Stunning

These included ‘Eternal Flame’ by The Bangles, ‘My Town’ by the McGarrigles, and ‘Why Worry’ by Dire Straits.

They sang the latter together on stage when Mary appeared with The Chieftains in 1999.

The pair moved on to writing together and Jessica included some of these songs in live shows and on her albums, such as ‘Here It All Comes Again’ and ‘The Less Said The Better’.

Other songs were written more recently – Mary writing lyrics and melodies to Jessica’s instrumentals – resulting in stunning multi-layered harmonies on tracks such as ‘Far Away’ and ‘Two Hearts, Broken’.

The result is a mix of styles unified by voices which sometimes can be difficult to tell apart, but also having their own unique characteristics.

Mary and Jessica play most of the instruments between them but Morgan Visconti – Mary’s son and Jessica’s brother – has supplied soaring electric guitar solos on three of the tracks.

Christian Thomas has been the invaluable engineer and technical support, also playing bass and additional guitar.

Previous releases on Mary Hopkin Music feature artwork by Mary, but this time Mary gave Jessica free rein with her paints.

You can pre-order ‘Two Hearts’ here


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