Untold River embraces new beginnings on ‘Time to Start Over’

There's something especially powerful about a song written at the exact moment life begins rearranging itself around you, and Untold River captures that feeling beautifully on ‘Time to Start Over’. The project of Manchester-born singer-songwriter Ciaran Egan, Untold River has steadily developed a wonderfully warm meeting point between Americana, alt-country and British folk storytelling, and this latest offering feels like one of his most heartfelt releases yet.

Written during the earliest days of the pandemic, ‘Time to Start Over’ arrived while he was facing his own period of enormous change. After seven years performing and writing with his former band, he was preparing to move forward alone while simultaneously leaving city life behind. Against the surreal backdrop of a world suddenly coming to a halt, those personal upheavals gave him the foundations for a song centred on uncertainty, transition and the courage needed to begin again.

Warm acoustic guitars sit alongside banjo and keys, while harmonies supplied by his former bandmates give the track an especially rich and communal character. There is a gorgeous folk-enriched quality running through those vocals, lending the song the kind of timeless warmth that makes it feel immediately familiar without becoming overly generic.

But ‘Time to Start Over’ is never weighed down by the circumstances that inspired it. Instead, there's this uplifting quality sitting beneath the reflection. Ciaran understands that starting again rarely means completely abandoning what came before; and sometimes it simply means carrying those experiences into somewhere new.

His music has always been informed by place, stretching from Manchester and Ireland through to the landscapes of America, and his songwriting continues to find common ground between those different traditions. Here, classic roots instrumentation meets the emotional directness of contemporary songwriting to wonderfully understated effect.

With this new delight, Untold River turns a moment of uncertainty into something warm, reassuring and quietly triumphant. Rich in melody and genuine feeling, it's another compelling reminder that sometimes the most important endings are simply beginnings waiting to reveal themselves.