There’s this unusual tenderness running through Hank Tree’s Care I. The album is rooted in songwriter Fergus MacDonald’s years working within the care sector, but its real subject is the vulnerability of simply needing another person.
Across its eleven tracks, he turns experiences of isolation, resilience, recovery and dependence into an atmospheric folk record that rarely treats its subject matter as something requiring dramatic emphasis. Instead, it allows small details, repeated thoughts and periods of instrumental space to carry much of the emotional weight.
His fast-picked classical guitar remains at the centre, surrounded by field recordings, distortion, layered vocals and more experimental textures. The result can feel delicate one moment and unsettled the next, reflecting the contradiction at the heart of care itself: strength and fragility constantly existing alongside one another.
The instrumental ‘Unspoken’ establishes that atmosphere immediately before ‘You Can Thrive’ introduces a note of cautious optimism. Then ‘Stuck’ turns towards emotional repetition, while ‘Shallow End’ finds hope without pretending that progress is straightforward. Before ‘Can I Do More’ brings the album’s questions of responsibility and self-examination particularly close to the surface.
Meanwhile, ‘Floating Hands’ draws more explicitly from the realities of frontline care. Yet he avoids turning the people behind the album into characters for an audience to observe. These are simply songs are informed by real experiences, but they deliberately leave enough ambiguity for us to recognise our own relationships with dependence, responsibility and support.
Clarissa Cheong’s double bass and harmonies deepen that sense of intimacy, while Peter Broderick’s involvement gives the record additional scale without pulling it away from its homemade beginnings.
By the closing instrumental ‘Leaving The Hospital’, Care I feels less more like an exploration of an experience almost everyone eventually encounters. Parents care for children. Children later care for parents. Friends, partners and strangers become responsible for one another in ways that can be loving, exhausting, frightening and necessary.
Hank Tree understands that dependence isn’t an exception to human life. It’s one of its defining conditions. And Care I approaches that truth with patience, compassion and an impressive refusal to simplify it.