[Cover photo credit to Brooke Stevens]
Singer/songwriter and Texas native Helene Cronin will be releasing a new album in March of 2025, titled Maybe New Mexico. An avid songwriter and collaborator with other writers, she always has music in the works, and last year released the holiday EP, Beautiful December. The holiday-themed EP followed two previous full-length albums, as well as two previous EPs.
We’re very pleased to debut Helene Cronin’s new song “Copperhill” today on Wildfire Music + News. The track arrives on digital platforms and for streaming this Friday, September 27th, 2024.
Cronin has a great affinity for “story-songs” and this song is based on a particularly intense true-life story of a town and a people who have been devastated by a mining operation that went way too far, making the area where it was based virtually unlivable over time. As such, you might well describe the song as a “cautionary tale.” By looking at what terrible mistakes mankind has made in the past, we might hope to avoid repeating them. But the song is far more than an anecdote or news item, as Cronin and collaborator Lydia Simons drill down to the human level, telling the story from the perspective of a native of the town of Copperhill. They focus on the emotions of someone who has seen first-hand, not only the savage damage that nature has faced at the hands of this particular kind of cash-grab mining, but the human toll that’s devalued the life of the miners and their families for generations. An appeal to protect the natural world from such damage should create an emotional response in humanity, but pointing out the direct evidence of the harm we do to our own lives and loved ones by destroying the environment is an even more sobering truth.
Words are chosen carefully chosen in “Copperhill” in order to personify the landscape and render the human toll as relevant as it can be, but the sounds that are blended for this song are also a really specific choice. Rather than a slow, mournful ballad, we have a rolling beat, electric guitars, and something not far from Country Rock or Blues Rock. That extra grit and mobility does a lot of justice to the subject matter, suggesting the dark underpinnings of the mining operation, and the anger that the speaker feels. To hear someone speaking out against an oppressive pattern of life on such a rocking track feels liberating, but also suggests the potential purpose of the track: To warn, remind, and raise anger, if necessary, to prevent these kinds of predatory practices. The song’s slight ray of hope, the fact that the narrator returns periodically, not only to “remember”, but to see if the land shows any signs of healing, feels familiar. We all feel uncertainty about whether historic wrongs perpetrated in previous generations can ever be righted, and whether there’s a way back from environmental damage. Cronin and Simonds pack all these considerations into a subtle and powerful song.
Helene Cronin shares about “Copperhill”:
I wrote “Copperhill” with Nashville artist Lydia Simonds. We booked our first co-writing session last October. As we were getting to know each other, she mentioned that her dad was raised in a town called Copperhill right on the Georgia/Tennessee border. As soon as she said the name my writer antennae went up! That name just sounded like it needed to be a song! We found documentaries where elderly people talk about growing up there, oddly making it sound like a great place to live and work.
Copperhill and the surrounding area were nearly devastated by copper mining in the 1800’s to mid-1900’s. Almost nothing survived, no snakes, no bugs, “no critters” to quote one older resident! Women would hang wash on the line and the toxicity of the the air ate holes in the clothing. Acid rain stripped the nearby hills of vegetation.Children went sledding down slag heaps in winter. All of this made for an interesting story and a song that gave my studio band a chance to get swampy. In recent times, the good news is that things are greening up again. Tourism is picking up and the trout and the mink are coming back to the river.
On “Copperhill”, Helene Cronin provides lead vocals, Bobby Terry plays guitars, mandolin, and dobro, Paul Eckberg plays drums, Matt Pierson plays bass, Charlie Lowell provides Hammond B3 and keys, and Mitch Dane plays harmonica. Production, engineering, and mixing comes from Mitch Dane. David Diel acted as Production assistant, and the track was recorded at Sputnik Sound in Nashville. It was mastered by Kim Rosen at Knack Mastering.
Helene Cronin has multiple shows coming up in October and November in Texas, and even some in New Mexico. You can find a listing here.
