British songwriter Sorrel Nation spends much of her year travelling in a camper called Dory with her partner, cellist Theo Holder, and their rescue dog, Lana. Between tours, she lives in a converted horse truck on the Isle of Wight. On her second album, Creeping Thyme, she writes about the people and places she has grown attached to along the way. For someone accustomed to packing up and moving on, she has plenty to say about staying connected. Her idea of home includes the company she keeps, the countryside she walks through and the familiar faces she meets when a tour brings her back to town.

Following Lost En Route, Creeping Thyme arrives on October 23 with a subject that can easily occupy an entire songwriting career: how a person builds a life they actually want to inhabit. Nation describes finding strength in everyday experience, drawing on relationships, familiar places and the changing seasons.

Written down, those are comfortable subjects. Living by them takes considerably more effort. Appreciating a place means spending enough time there to watch it change; keeping a relationship means accommodating somebody else’s needs alongside your own. Her album’s premise becomes more interesting when you consider the work involved in the peace she describes.

Choosing creeping thyme as the title gives those ideas a useful point of focus, right down at ground level. Nation associates the herb with folklore about courage, protection, peace and the memory of older customs. That is quite a burden for a small plant, although the choice has an appealing scale. A wild herb belongs to the places people walk through, brush against and gradually learn to recognise.

Naming the album after it directs attention towards the immediate surroundings. I find that more compelling than a grand declaration about reconnecting with the earth. You can start with something growing beside your feet and work outward from there.

The most persuasive part of this outlook is the connection between belonging and responsibility, particularly for an artist whose working life keeps taking her elsewhere. Touring means arriving in places where other people already have their routines, histories and attachments.

Over time, certain venues and faces become familiar. Nation has appeared at Black Deer, Isle of Wight Festival and Cambridge Folk Festival, and those recurring encounters offer a concrete context for an album concerned with the people who shape a life. Music gives her a reason to travel and a way to establish connections along the route. The subject has a social dimension as well as a pastoral one.

Her relationship with Sandy Denny’s Who Knows Where the Time Goes brings that process into sharper focus. Nation first performed the song at The Magic Teapot during Fairport’s Cropredy Convention in 2022. In her account, the details remain wonderfully specific: a fire, a fiercely hot day, a cup of tea and an audience of Denny fans smiling back at her. The song then accompanied four years of touring before her own version appeared in August. What interests me here is how a single performance became a recurring part of her working life. A borrowed song acquired personal associations through repetition, accumulating memories of the rooms and people surrounding it.

That history also gives the album’s reflections on time a human reference point. An older song passes between singers, reaches different audiences and becomes attached to fresh experiences. Nation’s invitation from Denny’s daughter, Georgia Rose Lucas, to contribute to Sandy Denny: A People’s History extends the connection beyond performance. She becomes one of the people helping preserve a collective memory.

Alongside her own writing, that involvement places Creeping Thyme within a tradition sustained through participation: singing the songs, telling the stories and remembering the circumstances in which they mattered. For a record concerned with old ways, that is a substantial connection to have.

My interest in Creeping Thyme lies with the particular life behind it. A converted horse truck, a touring partnership, a dog sharing the road. They also leave room for the practical demands that accompany her chosen freedom. Vehicles need looking after. Tours require planning. Sharing a small home requires patience. Read against those circumstances, her emphasis on resilience carries some weight. The attraction is in someone identifying what helps her keep going and choosing to give those things her attention.

What I find worth spending time with in Creeping Thyme is its consideration of a kind of ambition that receives relatively little airtime: building enough stability to remain open to the world. Nation places value on having people to return to, recognising the seasons and carrying familiar songs into new rooms. Those are modest aspirations with considerable consequences for how a person spends their days. Her album gathers them under the name of a plant associated with courage and protection, bringing two useful ideas together. Putting down roots requires commitment; continuing to grow requires room. Between the travelling and the homecoming, Sorrel Nation has given herself plenty to write about.

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