Working with producer Sandy Roberton (Hard Meat, Steeleye Span, Shirley Collins), Ian and bandmates, notably Andy Roberts who shared vocals on the album, created an atypical British folk album conceived around the idea of the legends surrounding Amelia Earhart and her supposed demise.

Both Matthews and Roberts had read the 1966 book The Search for Amelia Earhart[5][6] by CBS news correspondent Fred Goerner hypothesizing that Earhart and her flying companion Frederick Noonan had crashed around the Japanese held Marshall Islands area and been taken prisoner by the Japanese on Saipan, in the Marianas, in 1937.

Their Lockheed Electra plane had supposedly been outfitted with aerial cameras and had a bigger fuel tank than anyone outside of the US government knew.

That she is still considered a heroine of aviation and a distinctly American hero keeps the mystery of what happened to her in the greater cultural imagination.

Simply entitled Plainsong,[10] CD1 features In Search of Amelia Earhart plus various radio recordings and a demo of "I'll Fly Away".