The Time Has Come

Anne Briggs made her name through the 1960s as a peerless interpreter of traditional song – her voice, a rare, pure thing, was one of the decade’s most powerful conduits of archaic melody. On her second album, though, she focuses on the folk-informed songs she’d been writing over the years. Unsurprisingly, she’s as great a writer as she is a singer, and the stripped-back, acoustic The Time Has Come features several classics – the earthy, circular “Tangled Man;” “Wishing Well,” a pensive co-write with Bert Jansch; “The Time Has Come” itself, one of her most timeless numbers, built of a cyclical riff, over which she sings a song of flight and fancy. She’s still an exceptional interpreter, too, the album finishing with one of her most transcendent performances, of Lal Waterson’s heartbreaking “Fine Horseman.”