The roots of most family trees sprawl across the lawn of time and deep into the earth. Out of sight is often out of mind, of course, with many folks content to ignore the unseen unless and until a storm of some kind topples said tree.
For Brighton-based Helen Ganya, who was raised in Singapore, her Scottish-Thai ancestry has long been a source of consternation; it made her feel like an outsider everywhere she went. As she sings on “Mirror,” a track from her 2017 Consume Me album, “The white man sees me Asian, the Asian sees me white.” Or, as she explained in an interview that same year, “I don’t feel fully ingrained in British culture because I wasn’t brought up in it. I understand bits but then I grew up in a country neither of my parents are from. So I have a fragmented sense of what my identity is.” That fractured mindset began to heal itself whole during the early COVID years, when nonsensical anti-Asian sentiment bubbled to the fore.
Then, in 2021, her Thai grandmother—whom she regularly visited during her childhood summers—died. In addition to mourning her, Ganya found herself pondering her links to Thailand. The press release quotes her as saying, “I got my diary and wrote every single memory of my time as a child in Thailand, spending time with her, my grandad, my aunts and cousins and everything. I had these snapshots of memories that I just wrote down because I just suddenly panicked: it was like, who am I, then?”
Share Your Care is the result. It’s a startlingly original work that embraces her heritage while remaining fully footed in the arty world envisioned by such trailblazers as Kate Bush. The title track, for instance, blends both into a distinctive musical hue while relating her trips to her grandfather’s grave with her mother, aunts and grandmother. The moody “Mekong,” for its part, overflows with questions about her forebears that will now, sadly, go unanswered; it’s stark yet lush, and so very human. The compelling “Fortune” pays tribute to her mother, while “Horizon” references a dream that reunited her with her grandmother. The rhythmic “Morlam Plearn,” an instrumental, is a dance-floor treat, simultaneously foreboding and fun. The lone song sung in Thai, “Barn Nork,” leans on the Thai phrase for “outsider” that her extended family sometimes directed her way. “Hell Money” wonders whether money troubles follow us into the afterlife, while an electronica-derived—and hypnotic—rhythm marches through “Chaiyo!,” bringing with it references to superstitions and reincarnation.
Nothing quite prepares for the closing “Myrna,” an imagined conversation with her granddad that finds British-Nigerian musician Tony Njoku playing the part of the patriarch. It’s a moving song that, as the album as a whole, blends the best of all worlds. In short, Ganya’s Share Your Care is an arty endeavor that mines both the heart and memory. It’s filled with percolating melodies and rhythms and, above all, Ganya’s mesmerizing vocals. Play it once and you’ll play it again, guaranteed.
The Old Grey Cat 