Polly Paulusma plays Shoreham on back of new album

The album coincides with her Americana and blues-inspired new single Back Of Your Hand. Spokesman Richard Fryer said: “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. As always, she delights in the telling of stories, with littered spoken word aiding her as she utilis es infectious melodies and a light delivery to explore her characters. The product of a decade of writing, 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.’

“Each track on the LP examines a different aspect of life that women play. Snakeskin represents the daughter, Back Of Your Hand is the love interest, Dirty Circus the mother and so on.”

Polly said: “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”.

The album began life as a 24-track collaboration between friends producing a song a month to keep Polly songwriting while she finished her PhD. As such it features co-writes with Kathryn Williams, David Ford and the novelist Laura Barnett: “I culled down the original burgeoning song pile, and then some new songs popped out. They keep doing that, but you have to draw a line somewhere.”

Pivot is the fifth studio album and the ninth release from Polly whose thought-provoking albums since 2004’s Scissors In My Pocket have earned widespread praise. Polly is also a producer and label founder — her own label Wild Sound released records from nine other artists between 2012-2016 before becoming a folk imprint at OLI. She self-produced and recorded Pivot from her garden shed, with the exception of three days in studio for bass, drums, and strings, and she has directed and filmed all her own music videos for the project. Her book Angela Carter and Folk Song is coming out in December via Bloomsbury Academic.

Polly has toured the world supporting Bob Dylan, Jamie Cullum, The Divine Comedy and Marianne Faithfull, and played Glastonbury, T in the Park, V Festival and Cambridge Folk Festival others.