Emma Tricca records a selection of her tracks live and unadorned, just the poet and her guitar, creating an intimate performance.

Emma Tricca’s Prisms Of Winter is an intimate recording — a collection of twelve stripped‑down live recordings that feel less like a performance and more like a whispered conversation between artist and listener. Recorded in London’s backrooms and scattered studios, the album is suffused with a quiet magic, and the kind of intimacy that makes you lean in closer, as though Tricca were singing directly into your ear.

This is Tricca at her most vulnerable and poetic. By paring back the arrangements, she exposes the bare bones of her songs — the words, the voice, the guitar — and in doing so, reveals their timeless strength. The immediacy of the recordings creates a sense of closeness, as if each track were a secret shared in confidence.

The tracks she has selected are taken from her across her albums saying that, “So many of you have asked for a record that holds the quiet – the stripped-down versions of the old songs – and here it is.”

Opening track Winter My Dear’s guitar notes fall like snowflakes, delicate and crystalline, while Tricca’s sensual voice embraces the cold mystery of winter. It’s a song of solitude and storm, yet also of quiet companionship. A personal favourite of mine, All The Pretty Flowers, is a jaunty, folk tune reminiscent of Greenwich Village troubadours. Its sensuous imagery and lyrical playfulness make it one of the album’s most uplifting moments.

From Tricca’s wonderful Aspirin Sun, which we reviewed here, there is King Blixa, with its hypnotic fingerpicking which bubbles and rises like sunlight glistening in cold air. The mystical lyrics evoke bardic traditions, weaving puzzles of meaning into melody. Devotion is an emotional, restrained, and heartbreakingly beautiful track. Tricca sings of waiting for a lover who never arrives, her voice trembling with vulnerability: “I was hungry at heart… I was waiting at a corner for your car that never arrives.” And Rubens’ House, a haunted meditation on memory and melancholy, shifting from shadowed interiors to lush gardens with a change in rhythm and tone.

Distant Scream, from 2014’s Relic, includes the sound of sirens echoing in the background, underscoring a city song of fleeting shadows and encounters. Yet it remains tender, offering solace: “Lay your head down with me, I will wash your troubles clean.”

One of Tricca’s best known, and loved, songs, Salt, is beautifully captured, A testament to enduring love, even against the erosion of time: “Everywhere the wind will blow, my love… but none can take away my love.”

Prisms Of Winter is less an album than a diary of moments — fragile, poetic, and eternal. By stripping away ornamentation, Emma Tricca allows her words and melodies to stand unadorned, revealing their quiet power. It is a record that falls softly, like snow, transforming the world without you noticing until you look up and realise everything has changed.

This is a collection for winter nights, for solitude, for reflection. A delightful, unadorned gift from a poet who knows how to turn the mundane into magic.

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You can find Emma Tricca online here, Instagram, X and Threads.

All words by Mark Ray. More writing by Mark Ray can be found at his author archive. And he can be found on Instagram.