Wild Branch

Primrose Hill, London · b. 2004 & 2003 · FARA Records

Wild Branch is Caleb Adjei and Ruth Hale, an acoustic worship duo based in Primrose Hill, London. The name comes from the lyric's own self-description and it's literally true of both of them: neither was born into the covenant they sing about. He's Black British; she's American, from Denver. They met at a small North London church about six weeks after she'd arrived in the country knowing nobody — he was playing, and she started singing the harmony from the third row without being asked. Neither has offered a satisfactory explanation of why. They are not related and not a couple, and are both mildly tired of clarifying that.

Caleb (b. 23 March 2004) grew up in North London in a family where church was simply where Sunday happened. A quiet, bookish boy in a loud house — the one who went and read in another room. He is a reader who happens to sing, far more interested in what a passage actually says than in what he's been told it says. He read Romans 11 at nineteen and couldn't put it down, specifically the part where Paul warns Gentile Christians against exactly the arrogance his own tradition went on to display for two thousand years. He wrote nothing for a year. When he finally did, this was it. His voice is a warm, reverent tenor with no worship-leader theatrics in it, and he will not play a room above a certain size — he says the songs stop being true up there. Careful, grateful, unshowy.

Ruth (b. 1 March 2003) grew up in Denver inside a confident, rarely-quiet version of American church life, and grew up slowly noticing that the parts of the Bible her church liked least were the parts she found most interesting. She came to London at twenty-two knowing no one — the specific loneliness of being a stranger somewhere, with no claim on anything and nobody obliged to include you, which is not incidental to what this music means to her. She sings harmony by choice, temperament and conviction: clear, warm, unornamented, sitting above and around the lead rather than beside it. She doesn't solo, doesn't run and regards melisma as a form of showing off, and says the whole point of a harmony line is that it makes something else true. Still, watchful, and entirely unbothered by an audience. She decides when a song is finished, and nobody has successfully appealed. Exact, dry, immovable.