Love, Death and the Lady

Love, Death and the Lady is an album by Shirley and Dolly Collins. This is a companion-piece to Anthems In Eden, but with a darker tone to it. She attributes the 'melancholy' mood of the album to her own personal loneliness at that time. Many of the instrumentalists of Anthems In Eden are present, but they contributed sparser accompaniments. The figure of Death appears as a character in the title track. "The Oxford Girl", sung unaccompanied, is about an apparently motiveless murder of a woman by her erstwhile lover. The long instrumental sections which were such a feature of Anthems In Eden, are absent, apart from the start and end of "Plains of Waterloo". The male chorus is present on only one track, "The Bold Fisherman". The thematic unity of the album centres on murder, class conflict and betrayal. "The Outlandish Knight" concerns a serial killer. The album was produced by Austin John Marshall, Shirley's husband at the time. Rejected love plays a part in some songs, and this might echo the fact that Shirley and Austin were on the verge of divorcing each other. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love,_D...) under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...)