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Acclaimed pop, blues, jazz and soul singing sensation Sarah Jane Morris is proving once again that sisters are doing it for themselves with her new album Sisterhood 2.
Released on 6 March, the album collaboration with guitarist Tony Remy, features 11 tracks celebrating trailblazing female singer-songwriters of our time, including Dolly Parton, Amy Winehouse, Tracy Chapman, Joan Baez, Peggy Seeger and Sinead O’Connor.
Interview: Sarah Jane Morris, Singer
Sarah Jane Morris is a singer-songwriter, having found fame with bands like The Republic and The Communards. Her latest album, Sisterhood 2, is released on 8th March 2026, with each song dedicated to a different woman who has inspired Morris' music.....
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Released once again in advance of International Women's Day, The Sisterhood 2 is a worthy successor to Sarah Jane Morris and Tony Rémy's celebrated 2024 album. It presents 11 more luminous portraits of female singer-songwriters – artists Morris calls her "essential lodestars" – each chosen for their excellence and originality, dual role as writer and interpreter, and artistic courage.
With her fabulously rich timbral quality and storytelling gift, Morris inhabits each subject while remaining unmistakably herself. In co-writer, co-producer and guitarist Rémy she has found the ideal creative foil. Album opener "Longing To Be Free" pays tribute to Peggy Seeger's life of musical activism, its extended outro lingering like a rallying cry. Opening with delicately layered, fingerpicked guitars and fiddle, the poignant "Oh Mother My Mother" honours Sinéad O'Connor by tapping into the mythological, transformative world of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Written for Tracy Chapman, "I Can Hear Jesus Weeping" delivers a melodically beautiful but biting rebuke of society's abandonment of the vulnerable.
"Love Wit and Stardust" captures Dolly Parton's generous spirit with a disarmingly funky chorus, while "Always Both and Never" conjures Joan Baez's world with richly layered guitars and Morris's voice doubled at the octave – heroism and hedonism in perfect tension. Bonnie Raitt's groove-driven tribute “Sweet Mama Raitt” gives Rémy room for a blazing solo, and Morris demonstrates rare interpretative subtlety in the Joan Armatrading offering, "Let Only Love Remain".
The wonderful “Crazy Angel” for Patti Smith possesses a pleasing grittiness, while the sepulchral funk of “Also Known As Etta James” (for Etta James) is a delicious homage to Janis Joplin’s role model and Bonnie Rait’s idol. The album closes magnificently with "The Dignity of Love" for Janis Ian, a Bacharach-rich, brass-and-strings celebration of love in all its forms. A fabulous collection which pulls you in a myriad of emotional directions.
Source: theartsdesk.com/new-music/morris-and-remy-return-more-essential-lodestars-sisterhood-2
SARAH Jane Morris is one of this country’s leading creative forces. She should be cherished, smothered in bubble wrap and preserved, because individuals don’t come along like her very often – someone who is constantly willing to experiment and reinvent themselves in the quest for musical excellence. Principled, always pushing boundaries and a great advocate of live music.
Marking 30 years since first appearing at Ronnie Scott’s in London’s West End, she returned to the iconic venue on Wednesday November 6 with a remarkable album to perform. The Sisterhood comprises songs about 10 female artists who have framed Sarah Jane’s musical journey from band The Republic in the early 1980s, through to the Communards and her long and distinguished solo career.
Albums such as Bloody Rain, Sweet Mystery (The Songs Of John Martyn) and Compared To What (a collaboration with Antonio Forcione) should adorn most record collections. The Sisterhood should join them. It’s a revelation.
The Sisterhood is a work of tender love and utter respect that pays tribute to some of the world’s most iconic female artists: all swashbuckling pioneers who have left big musical footprints in the sands of time.....
Click here to read full review on Close Up Culture website >
Released yesterday to coincide with International Women’s Day, The Sisterhood will surely prove to be one of the brightest jewels in Sarah Jane Morris’s varicoloured discography.
A labour of love which Morris has been contemplating for two decades, the album presents a tribute to “my ten singers, my essential lodestars”, as she puts it, acknowledging and honouring female artists past and present who have inspired her own musical journey. Wonderfully arranged and stylistically diverse, Morris and her co-writer/co-producer Tony Rémy pull off a remarkable feat of crafting 10 songs which tell each singer-songwriter’s story while simultaneously capturing their musical and lyrical essence.
The multilayered title track serves up a deliciously funked-up homage to the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, while the trailblazing Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith, is celebrated in “Couldn't Be Without”. A monstrous backbeat and stacked up horns underpin “Tomorrow Never Happens”, a paean to Janis Joplin tellingly programmed directly after Joplin’s greatest musical inspiration.
As well as glorious tributes to Nina Simone (“So Much Love”), Rickie Lee Jones (“Jazz Side of the Road”) and Billie Holiday (“Junk In My Trunk”), “Rimbaud Of Suburbia” draws aofascinating line between the singular sound-world of Kate Bush and the striking free verse of the precocious French poet of the title, whose 1872 poem, Bonne pensée du matin, is heard in its entirety.
Celebrating female artists and visionaries that have proven inspirations throughout her life and career, Sarah Jane Morris’ ‘The Sisterhood’ finds her at the pinnacle of creativity.
A representation of her musical foundations, the 10 songs on the record see the chart-topping singer pay tribute to Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Miriam Makeba, Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones, Annie Lennox and Kate Bush.
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On International Women’s Day 8 March 2024, British soul, jazz and R&B singer Sarah Jane Morris launched her new album The Sisterhood.
It is her tribute to ten iconic women singers and songwriters, who have had a massive influence on the development of the popular song. This is Morris’s lock-down project. She and her husband artist Mark Pulsford spent the months of isolation studying the lives of pioneering singers and musicians, women whose music is world famous, but whose stories are less well known. Together Morris and Pulsford then wrote a series of song lyrics, each an illuminating, sometimes shocking tale from the lives of these remarkable women.
Morris then got together with her long time co-writer/co-producer/guitarist Tony Rémy to write the music. Each song would be absolutely contemporary, it would also reflect the styles, forms and influences of the artists depicted. The ten women chosen are: Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Miriam Makeba, Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones, Annie Lennox and Kate Bush – representing a wide mixture of styles of popular music.
To honour the legacies of these stars, whilst creating new work demands a breadth of experience of different popular musical forms as well as great versatility in performance styles. Clearly Morris and Rmy have the necessary skills.
Sarah Jane Morris is arguably most remembered for her pipe-belting performance on The Communards’ 1986 chart-smash ‘Don’t leave me this way’. However, since those heady days Morris has released fifteen solo albums that traverse a range of elements: jazz, pop, rhythm & blues, soul, 2014’s Africa-dedicated ‘Bloody Rain’ and a folk tribute to John Martyn in 2019. No rest for the committed.
Her new long-player out on the appositely named Fallen Angel label, ‘The Sisterhood’ is suitably released on International Women’s’ Day and is an artistic nod to her myriad influences, aesthetically, politically, vocally.
Ten sonic salutes to trailblazers, path-forgers and cultural cornerstones Morris herself terms her ‘lodestars’: Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Miriam Makeba, Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones, Annie Lennox, and Kate Bush..........
.........‘The Sisterhood’ is a wonderful walk down memory lane, a wistful wander through past mistresses’ magnificence and sadly a depressing reminder of oppression, suppression and repression. Morris rights wrongs and sets thing straight in style.
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