It is always a delight in the business of music discovery, record hunting and general audio thrill seeking, to come across an artist who you assume will be of a familiar type only for them to far exceed your presumptions. Not only that, but also equally beguiling is when there is something quite mysterious about them. They do not conform in the way so many of their peers do, despite using the exact same tools and even occupying the same space, there is still that essence of the unknown. Bity Booker in 2026 has been, for me, one of those unexpected encounters. Yes, Bity (pronounced Bee-Tee) is an acoustic guitar playing singer who writes and plays her own material, a very well populated field of expression you must agree, but she stands apart because there is an element of magic to her work that is quite hard to pin down. So, right there is the wonderful thing, because so many times the greatest music casts a spell and often it is not a mixture you can dissect down to the ingredients that make it work. And thanks to the positive impact, there is no need to do that anyway, that is where the wonderment lies. The music of Bity Booker is the sound of another realm and from the moment you cross over there are no explanations necessary, you are simply mesmerized.

We begin with ‘The Owl Song’ which sets the scene for the individualist approach that dominates throughout. It is something of a call and response duet with the feathered friend in the title, offering the kind of delicate, whimsical beauty deployed by Joanna Newsom, which is as close to a comparison I can make although fundamentally, Bity plays wholly her own style. This strange brew is there on ‘A Tear,’ a song that immediately places the tunefully picked acoustic guitar and a sprightly, subtly chilling, voice in line with the natural world, moulding the environment to human connections, drawing the lines between how we feel joy and pain in tandem with our planet. Those same teardrops are also falling on ‘Dewdrops,’ echoing into a vast valley as if tumbling through open air and landing in widening circles of space, but this is not a sorrowful experience, more like a natural serenity. There is an elegantly gliding quality to the whole work and a connection to flying animals is present throughout, songs are based on the crow and parrots (with a neat reference to them originally escaping from Jimi Hendrix’s cage) although the standout for me has to be the graceful ‘Love Is Like A Swallow In The Spring.’ It all adds up to a mightily mature work on what Bity herself calls “my first ‘non-debut album.’ I call it a ‘non-debut album’ because I have long been making music in different forms, from death metal to alternative folk, so it feels strange calling it a ‘debut album’. It is the product of years of songwriting and performing solo.” 

‘There’s No Song About A Stone’ arrives as an independent release, issued in a run of just 250 blue‑marbled LPs alongside CD and digital formats, but its cottage industry design feels entirely in keeping with the way Booker moves through her craft. She admits to taking her time with music in a way that makes her happy, working outside commercial rhythms, outside expectations, letting songs form at their own pace. She thinks of her creations as things shaped by time, dreams, thoughts, rain, wind and you can hear that philosophy in the recordings themselves. These tapes feel alive; birds flicker at the edges, people pass by, London hums in the background, all of it part of the room she recorded in, all of it folded into the spell. So here is a gathering of some of Bity’s favourite songs, a mix of pieces road‑tested at gigs and others never aired before, but what binds them is the sense of an artist following her own internal weather. It stands apart from the regular singer‑songwriter crowd thanks to its ethereal detachment, its deep connection to the natural world, its refusal to sand down the oddities that make it breathe. Booker is flying her freak flag with pride, and the result is a record that will stand out wherever it is heard; this is the sound of someone fully unleashing their creative essence into the world and trusting it to find its way. Should the stars align favourably, this singer and these songs will do just that.

Danny Neill

You can get yourself a physical or downloaded edition of the album here: https://bitybooker.bandcamp.com/album/there-s-no-song-about-a-stone