Musician Laura Cannell shares a year of Red Kites, lighthouses at night, and making up with the sea.

Last week I watched 43 Red Kites gather and settle in for their communal roost. My sister and I were walking down a lane near where we grew up in South Norfolk, and the Kites were calling and wheeling. Watching so many raptors together was emotional, their distinct fork-tailed shapes soaring on a backdrop of clouded greys. The scale was so strange, a flock of eagles who appeared like rooks from a distance, their movements and calls like a renaissance polyphony of multiple choirs and soloists filling the cathedral sky from every corner.

According to the RSPB they have gone from almost extinct in 1995 to an increase of 2464% in 2023. The lane we walked down is where we used to catch the school bus in 1995. I don’t think I was aware of ‘nature’ then, I was just in it — I’ve always just been in it (except when I was at music college in London, thinking about it now it makes perfect sense that it was completely the wrong environment for me to be in physically).

Every day, my half-a-mile walk, sometimes lugging my cello to the unofficial bus stop (oak tree) on the corner. We were off the beaten track, one of the awkward stops outside of the villages. I used to feel so exposed in that moment, going from being alone in the trees and lanes and my thoughts to suddenly on a bus full of loud people, the driver taking off before I’d sat down while I tried desperately not to knock the bridge out of the cello in its canvas case as I bumped it along the narrow gangway, past everyone to the only available seats (the bridge did get knocked out a few times).

Being in this place with my sister felt poignant and positive. I truly felt like the Kites were going to save us all from ourselves. Let’s give it all back, everything. Start from here, look at how they behave, let them take charge: they are not consumed with money and power and greed and death machines. Let the Kites gather in their roost and work it out, let them hold a mirror to human stupidity and remind us that we can work together, dream together but still be independent.

My sister and I often joke about having two tables ‘for one’ pushed together. We each need our space — our own creative output requires a magical discipline that can only to be developed and produced with a large amount of time alone — but it’s also good to feel part of something bigger. In that moment, watching the Kites roost at dusk, I felt like there was a lot of hope.

A while ago, when I wrote for CBTR more regularly, I talked about falling out with the sea. I couldn’t bear to look at it, it was barren and bleak, and I took alternative routes when I had to drive to avoid glimpsing it.

The sound was constant, it was driving me mad, and I was scared that if I got too close, my life would fall over the edge. As I change in life, my feelings have changed towards the sea. I realise that it is a private need, a personal love that we have. I cannot be there in the summer watching and hearing a coast made busy with too may people. Bright, exposed, open, with a forced smile to be jolly in the summer. The summer does not make me happier, it’s taken me this long to realise that my instincts and comfort go against light = happy, dark = sad. Like when someone very early on tried to teach me that music in a minor key sounded ‘sad’, and a major key sounded ‘happy’. I couldn’t get my mind around this, the minor keys made me so happy, because they were full of feeling and nuance. The major keys just felt like they were telling me to feel something positive, happy or jolly when I wasn’t. Not that I was unhappy — I just felt like I didn’t fit any of the rules. I was obviously taking it very literally as a 7 or 8 year old, but perhaps this was the beginning of realising that I could not get on board with ideas of rules in music. Darkness and minor keys equal atmosphere, imagination, melancholy, depth, joy, intrigue, dissonance, passion, life, determination, manifestation, emotion, grit, power, love and so much more. They are autumn, winter and spring.

Maybe summer is the major key for me, it’s all laid out in front, brightly for you to see, no mysteries here. But I need the search, the hunt and the mystery, I need to always be exploring and growing in both nature and music. I need the sea in the autumn, the winter and the beginnings of spring when it speaks to me the most. The times when everything is hidden, shrouded, covered in leaves or growing in new directions, unseen and unspoken. Where the sound on the violin is in my body waiting to be let out through the pressure of my bow. Like the life which happens out of sight between the seabed and the crashing waves above.

I have learned that the sea, though constantly shifting stays the same, but I am always moving, emotional fluctuations, emotional plasticity. I don’t get to decide that I have fallen out with the sea, I was just there at the wrong time. When you come up against something so huge that you are not ready to deal with — death, grief, sickness or great changes — you can always find ways to avoid it. But eventually, when the time is right and you have the inner strength to have a conversation, you know you will go back and often be surprised by the response.

My emotional response to the landscape and the seascape is so much bigger than the way I think about people. There are a handful of favourite people who I need to see or speak to, but my urge to soak in sea with all of my senses is overwhelming.

Standing in Walberswick on the south side of the Harbour, the stretched beam of Southwold Lighthouse swept across the sea and the salt marshes. This tiny village that sits on the edge of the sea and corner of Blackwater was ours for a few moments. Quiet in the off-season before Christmas, no cars, no walking families, just the light and faint noise of The Bell pub. The air and water made the lighthouse sound like it was whooshing in time to a soundtrack. The gossamer clouds were glowing from the lamp room beam and maybe from the stars behind. Within minutes it became a sparkling dark starry sky, and a dream of winter, of quietude, of magic, of movement even when I am still. I am happy to know that the sea is there for me whenever I want to come home to it.

This year I read, wrote, recorded and released a lot of music, soaking up inspiration from medieval bestiaries, Icelandic folklore, the Anglo Saxon lyre from the Sutton Hoo ship burial, landscape photography created from from NASA image archives, ancient Christmas carols, hauntings, weird dreams and so much more. I had a very quiet year in terms of performing live, and an intensively rich year of making and creating. I fell back in love with traditional fiddle music, and started playing it for myself again as part of my practice routine. I wrote several albums and EPs for production libraries with no compromise.

My releases have been in the Official UK Album Download Charts (3 releases), on the radio (BBC 3, 4 and 6Music and more), in the Guardian, on the television (in surprising places like Emmerdale and Horrible Histories, Race Across the World & news programmes).

My music has travelled the world, and I have been rooted for the first time in years. I have turned down performances in other countries because of anxiety; it has not all been easy, but I haven’t stopped creating and making and believing that music makes a difference, not only to me, but to anyone that it reaches and speaks to. I am learning the boundaries of comfort and my own needs, what priorities can be. Music has its own life, and I am excited to see what happens next. It is, as we all know, completely made up, and as my sister Sarah says, “we are all weird aliens on a blue green planet spinning through space, everything is completely ludicrous and incredible”, so why not make up good stories? What if it all works out, and the sea can be our friend rather than an overwhelming ledge?

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Find all of Laura’s musical releases here.