What becomes of a memory when the one who shared it is gone?
Helen Ganya’s Share Your Care began with absence, with the loss of her Thai grandmother, a figure who once anchored childhood summers and the feeling of belonging. But this isn’t an album about gaps or ghosts. It’s about what stays behind: the scent of something half-remembered, the way a voice still rings in an empty room, the rituals we carry forward without realising. It’s about holding on, but also about knowing when to let go.
Ganya, a Brighton-based Scottish-Thai songwriter (formerly Dog In The Snow), has always been drawn to shadow, to the edges of things. But here, the music shifts, turns its face towards the light. There’s clarity in it, an openness. Though Ganya has released beautiful Thai language versions of songs for charity, she hesitated to fold her heritage too neatly into her work—aware of how it might be seen, how it might be received. Now, she lets it breathe.
Share Your Care is both an act of remembrance and a rediscovery, interweaving traditional Thai instruments—khim, ranat ek, pi (Thai oboe)—with a soundscape that is unmistakably her own. The album moves like memory itself, not in a straight line but in loops and echoes, luminous and shifting.
On ‘Horizon’, inspired by a dream of her grandmother, the pi wails like a voice calling across water, its melody curling in the air before breaking apart. It doesn’t mourn. It remembers. Grief is not a weight here; it’s a current, something to be carried forward.
The title track leans into ritual. A quiet pilgrimage—offerings at a graveside, gestures that speak louder than words. The shimmering khim meets the grit of bass, and Ganya’s voice is steady but soft, as if whispering a story you once knew but forgot. There’s joy in it, a quiet triumph in the act of remembering.
Throughout, fragments—conversations, instrumental sketches—slip in and out, shifting the frame. ‘Fortune’, written for Ganya’s mother, is both delicate and resolute, an ode to the quiet resilience of diasporic women. The chimes rise, lifting its message like a breath. Then, there’s ‘Hell Money’, where the mood darkens. The weight of sacrifice, the cost of leaving, of staying. Ganya’s voice hovers over layered textures, the simmer of something unspoken. Rage, restrained but present.
‘Barn Nork’ is the album’s only Thai-language track. “Outsider,” roughly translated. But there’s humour in it, a wry self-awareness. The song wears its dual identity with a grin, bright and full of movement. Because sometimes belonging is a dance, not a burden.
Other moments cut deeper. ‘Chaiyo!’—a grandfather’s voice rings out, cheering through time, threading into reflections on family, on what carries forward. And on ‘Myna’, the final track, British-Nigerian musician Tony Njoku steps into the role of her late grandfather, asking, simply, “How did you live the way you did?” The question lands like a stone in the silence, the kind of thing you wish you’d asked when you had the chance.
Production-wise, longtime collaborator Rob Flynn deserves mention. The Thai instruments, recorded with Artit Phonron and Chinnathip Poollap, aren’t just stitched in—they belong, woven seamlessly into the fabric of the sound. There’s no tokenism here, no box-ticking. Just integration, instinctive and real. Perhaps that’s the heart of the album itself: a refusal to separate past from present, tradition from innovation, the personal from the collective.
Share Your Care isn’t just Ganya’s story. It’s an invitation, an offering, a handful of memories passed from one palm to another. It’s not just about loss—it’s about connection, the unseen patterns that shape us, even after someone is gone. The music doesn’t try to resolve anything neatly, nor does it reach for sentimentality. It simply sits with what is left, acknowledging both the weight and the worth of what remains. A presence, still felt. And that, maybe, is enough.
‘Share Your Care’ is released on 7th February, via Bella Union
LP artwork by Phannapast Taychamaythakool
