About Talis
Talis Kimberley is an award-winning songwriter with an astonishing number of amazing songs to her credit. She’s been writing and performing for over 30 years, and her songs cover such diverse subjects as knitting and gardening, baking and politics, folklore and fairytale, books and history, faith, farming, and the making of lists.
Prolifically creative, Talis’s current output is very much rooted in myth and ‘found folklore’. She’s working on a magical new songcycle, “Copper on the Tree”, which will debut in 2023.
In her interfaith work, writing and sharing songs of solace and radical compassion, Talis continues to address the intersection between her (and others’) faith, and the Land.
Talis is an energetic performer who delights in taking her audience places and bringing them back, changed. A storyteller to her bones, Talis’s songs will challenge you, entertain you, and take root in your heart.
Bristol-born and now Wiltshire-based with her creative roots deep in the chalk, Talis plays guitar, bouzouki, and English Concertina. She also plays fiddle with a local Morris side.
Talis has sung around the UK, in the US, and in Canada and Germany, solo or with her international ‘floating’ bandmates. She’s at home on a festival stage or in a library, at a house concert or folk club, or anywhere her literate, intimate, poetic, and occasionally downright silly songs are welcome.
During 2020, like many performers she took her live work online, beginning a series of ‘Kitchen Sessions’ in which she presents old and new songs from her kitchen sofa, by livestream. They’re populating her YouTube channel (‘like and subscribe’ for notifications when a new video appears).
Talis’s recent themed mini-albums ‘Cloth of Gold – Songs of Sheep and Farming’ and ‘Eleanor Roosevelt’s Knitting – Songs of Spinning and Yarncraft’ follow her three earlier studio albums: ‘Archetype Cafe’, ‘The Hearth and the Hive’, and ‘Queen of Spindles’. The latter two especially chart her engagement with climate change and resource depletion, telling stories from the global stage, and the kitchen and garden.
Some of Talis’s songs are a call to arms to create communities and to work together for a fairer and more sustainable world – while others may tell you how to make quince jelly, or relate the history of the Cotswold sheep.
Talis has run for Parliament in two General Elections, and stood in several local ones; for a time she chaired her local Parish Council. Whatever else she’s doing, there’s usually yarncraft or patchwork nearby.
Talis’s songs – the funny, the poignant, the whimsical, and the powerful – are an offering of kindness and peace in an uncertain world.