Clara Mann’s Wishbone Turns a Solo Folk Record Into a Band Album

Clara Mann’s second album, Wishbone, arrives less than a year after her debut. Rift came out at the start of 2025 as a solo record: Mann, her acoustic guitar and very little else. Wishbone keeps the folk framework intact but changes the personnel, and that change is the substance of the record.

Recorded with a band, it adds brushed snare, violin and the occasional banjo to arrangements that previously stood alone. The clearest shift is Mann’s piano, which moves forward and carries much of the album’s weight. Sorrow sits between the notes rather than inside the vocal line, and the playing stays spare enough that each added instrument registers as an event instead of decoration.

Her writing has not loosened. Mann builds characters through concrete detail and through what she withholds. On “Fortuna” a single image, a cigarette in the rain, does the work of a paragraph. She also treats syllables as material, stretching or swallowing them when syntax would get in the way of feeling.

The lineage is legible. Last year she recorded “500 Miles,” a song usually credited to Hedy West, with Owen Spafford on fiddle, and her phrasing sits easily beside older British folk singers. Wishbone is not a revival exercise, though. It is a songwriter testing sparse songs against other players and learning which ones hold.