B-Side Guys

“Hunger” was written by Graeme Williamson, not Julian Taylor, and that distance matters. Taylor came to the song through Canadian Songwriting Hall of Fame inductee Frank Davies, who passed it along because the lyrics stopped him cold. That chain of hands, writer to advocate to interpreter, is exactly how traditional folk music is supposed to move, and it gives Taylor’s version a weight that purely personal songwriting sometimes can’t carry. He’s not confessing. He’s bearing witness.

The lyrics do the thing that the best folk writing does: they make an abstraction physical. “It settled down among us / like a guest who never leaves / it turned mothers against children / turned brothers into thieves.” Hunger isn’t a statistic here. It’s a presence with behavior, something that moves into a community and starts dismantling it from the inside. The gentleness of the melody against that image is not a contradiction. It’s the point.

Taylor, a JUNO Award-nominated songwriter with over two decades of genre-spanning work behind him, recorded the track live in a single day at a studio in England with longtime collaborators, and that immediacy shows. The Celtic-influenced full-band arrangement expands the original acoustic framework without smoothing out its edges, and the live recording method gives it the kind of organic weight that production can’t manufacture after the fact.

Taylor and Davies have committed a portion of sales to the Band Aid Charitable Trust, which reframes the act of listening slightly. The song was always about a real and ongoing thing. The donation just makes that harder to look away from.