Grace Elizabeth Harvey will release her new EP, Songs Of Devotion, on 16th October. The Liverpool folk singer-songwriter has introduced the five-track collection with ‘The Dream Of Common Language’, a song about love, understanding and the moments when words begin to fail.
The EP will be Grace’s first body of work since her debut, Other Faith, arrived in spring 2025. While that earlier collection circled questions of faith, Songs Of Devotion focuses on language, miscommunication and the distance that can remain between people even when they are trying to be understood.
Poetry, open windows and words that cannot quite reach
Grace Elizabeth Harvey found the starting point for ‘The Dream Of Common Language’ after coming across Adrienne Rich’s poetry collection The Dream of a Common Language in a charity shop. The song opens conversationally over fingerpicked acoustic guitar before widening into an extended instrumental passage.
More on Grace Elizabeth Harvey
Its lyrics gather fragmented images including cigarette papers, hazel-coloured eyes and cold telephone lines. Grace describes the song as giving up on love in pursuit of deeper philosophical understanding, while questioning whether expression can ever fully carry what people feel and desire.
The single also draws from a recurring dream in which Grace is screaming but no sound emerges, or the reason for the anger remains unclear. She has connected that image to pent-up disappointment and injustice, describing fantasy and goodwill as ways she often copes with life.
‘The Dream Of Common Language’ and the wider EP were recorded live at producer Gus White’s residential studio, The Barn, with double bassist Sam Crooks and drummer Lloyd Haines. The sessions were mixed and mastered to tape, with birdsong entering through open windows and becoming part of the recordings.
Grace’s delicate, near-spoken delivery sits at the centre, while open guitar tunings reflect her background in Baroque cello. She treats the guitar as another melodic voice, allowing its counter-melodies and harmonic movement to respond to the lyrics rather than simply sit beneath them.
Songs Of Devotion was written during a year spent moving between Liverpool, London and Manchester. Train journeys, second-hand bookshops, borrowed sofas and journals filled whenever a moment appeared all became part of a collection concerned with the questions that follow Grace from one song to the next.
The EP contains ‘An Ode’, ‘Devotion’, ‘Where Tomorrow Meets Today’, ‘The Dream Of Common Language’ and ‘Forget’. It will be released digitally and on 10-inch vinyl, with live dates planned across Liverpool, London, Manchester and Sheffield through August, September and October.
You can listen to ‘The Dream Of Common Language’ here.
