Album I · Female voices
What the Bees Know
Agency, constraint, inherited expectation and self-determination—told through character, ritual, landscape and song.
The first album · Coming 2026
What theBees Know
Thirty-six songs across two linked albums. A contemporary world of female voices, buried memory, inherited stories and the things the landscape refuses to forget.
02linked albums
≈36original songs
Sep 2026first studio phase
North Yorkshireregional collaboration
Beneath the surface
Two albums. Two sets of voices. One terrain of memory.
What the Bees Know and What the Ground Keeps share characters, stories and landscapes, returning to them from different positions. Together they ask what is inherited, what is resisted—and what remains in the ground.
Album II · Male voices
What the Ground Keeps
Grief, absence, emotional inheritance and the quieter histories carried beneath the visible life.
The music
No single genre can hold it.
This is contemporary song-based work drawing on art-pop, rock, intimate piano writing, folk and world-music influences, alongside experimental textures and arrangements.
Some songs arrive almost bare: a voice, a piano, a room. Others are rhythmically driven, ritualistic or harder-edged. Each arrangement follows the emotional and narrative character of the song.
The first album is fully written and demoed. Seven songs from the second have already emerged. The first professional recording phase begins in September 2026.
Preliminary recordings
Listen before the work is finished.
These demos are working maps: the songs before studio voices, musicians and final arrangements complete their shape.
Within What the Bees Know
The women in these songs are not symbols of an argument. They are characters confronting the names, roles and histories handed to them.
Female agency recurs throughout the album through stories of autonomy, imposed roles, resistance, inheritance and self-determination.
AutonomyInheritanceConstraintResistanceBecoming
Film · John Taylor introduces the work
Why these songs—and why now?
The origin of The Holding Ground, the two-album structure and the journey from home demos to a regional audiovisual collaboration.
Video file, YouTube or Vimeo placeholderThe first recording phase
Voices from the region
Three North Yorkshire singer-songwriters join John Taylor in September 2026 to begin turning the completed demos into professional recordings. Additional regional guitarists and musicians will enter as the arrangements develop.
John TaylorWriter · producer · instruments · vocals
Amy MaherVocalist
Kirsty BrannanVocalist
Kathryn LongbottomVocalist
Beyond the record
The work leaves the speakers.
The longer ambition is an audiovisual exhibition or installation in Skipton and elsewhere in the region: local artists responding to individual songs through painting, assemblage, image and physical texture.
The completed work will also appear digitally and in physical editions bringing together recordings, artwork, lyrics and contextual material.
Contact The Holding Ground
Collaborate. Support. Listen closer.
For funding, press, recording, performance and visual-art enquiries.