Recommendations: August 2013

"Home" - Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes
This was released back in 2009 but it was still the song of the summer for me this year, partly due to the fact that my French family (who are always a couple of years behind in popular culture which is sort of lovely) have been playing it frequently. It's just incredibly happy and full of love, and a song I know I'll be listening to for a long time.


Princess Century
I had the joy of watching Austra drummer Maya Postepski's UK solo debut this month in Manchester, and whilst I'm not normally massively into electro stuff her live show is beautiful, she incorporates film into her set really nicely, and new album "Lossless" is really special.

"The Wire" - Haim
Haven't stopped going on about these three sisters from LA for weeks, and their new single is just stellar - -dirty- moans of guitar in the introduction, the -slow/anticipation- rhythm of it all and a . The video is hilarious, smart and brilliantly showcases all of the sass and style of Alana, Danielle and Este.

"The Civil Wars" - The Civil Wars
The Civil Wars latest album is a very personal and open admission and venture into the turmoil between members John Paul White and Joy Williams (they recorded it at a time they were barely speaking to each other, think "Rumours"), and possibly in there is an explanation for the hiatus they've just taken because of "irreconcilable differences". But a lot of the songs actually seem to come from a place of joy and not hate, specifically "Eavesdrop" and "From This Valley", though I love every song on this record. I'm really hoping these two will make music together some day.

"Bonfire Heart" - James Blunt
I've said this before and I'll probably say it again (albeit always a little sheepishly), I genuinely think that James Blunt is really good - some of the better mawkish ballads in his discography are really nice, and there's definitely some great cheesy feel-good singles that are fun to sing along with when you've had about six glasses of wine (ahem) . His new single "Bonfire Heart" is tiny bit folky, definitely catchy and the video is one you'll call out for being tacky and secretly it warms your heart a little bit.

"Dancing in the Dark" (cover) - Eddie Berman and Laura Marling
Not much to say about this Springsteen cover except it's very simple, and very beautiful. I'm not sure what makes it so captivating - the -word about guitar pattern-, or how heartbreakingly vulnerable Marling's falsetto sounds singing the words "I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face." 

When Brave Bird Saved

"WHEN BRAVE BIRD SAVED"
A short film by Fred and Nick, soundtracked by the first four tracks from Laura Marling's new album Once I Was An Eagle.

Marling is one of my absolute heroes: she is beautiful, the calm and the storm, and her gravelly voice goes from the softest whisper and to the harshest bellow in instants. I want to hold back everything I have to say about the music from her upcoming release until Once I Was An Eagle is out, but it's sounding exceptional so far.

I've always loved it when films are released alongside albums, ever since The Wall, endorsing each song as a concept, as stories and pictures as well as sound. This one is no exception, illustrating all of those themes of shadowy rooms and empty streets, sex and dark romance, that are found in the lyrics of Marling's music. And Laura herself has clearly grown so much in confidence and songwriting ability, from the accomplished but shy seventeen year old appearing in the charts in 2008.

When Brave Bird Saved is eerie, and oddly ethereal, bringing together music and art and also dance, in the most gorgeously creative ways. Laura Marling is lovely, playing the role of that narrator she so often sings as; terrifying, simultaneously a lost girl and a wicked queen.

You can watch the full version of When Brave Bird Saved here, and Once I Was An Eagle is due for release at the start of May.

"it's a curse of the mind to be sad at night"

On Friday, appropriately enough on International Women's Day, the princess of "nu-folk", Laura Marling, announced the release of her fourth studio album. "Once I Was An Eagle" comes out on the 27th May in the UK, and  the 28th May in the US, produced by Ethan Johns, who worked on Laura's last two LPs. This is "Where Can I Go?", the first release from it.



Marling's website calls the new album a "hugely ambitious record that reflects the dark themes of "A Creature I Don't Know"". The song above confirms this, a melody that seems so gently nostalgic and relaxed, incorporating soft organ that serves as a reminder of Ryan Adams' strong influence in Laura's songwriting. The lyrics contrast this, the use of the same character we hear in "A Creature I Don't Know"'; bitter and worn by love. A chorus that cries out "Late at night he'll come to me and tell me I'm alone - don't you think I don't already know?", it all suggests the point of view of a hardened and broken heart. It breaks into gloriously liberal strumming, that feeling of release that comes with an openly tuned guitar.

"Once I Was An Eagle" is avaliable for preorder here.

Recommendations: February and March

"THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER" - Stephen Chbosky
I'm definitely not the first to write about how brilliant this book is, and I'm coming rather late to the party but I can't go without mentioning it. Sometimes you read a book at just the right time: "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" just sums up all of the weird events that occur during the "growing up" period, and doing things for the first time. Also one of the smaller plots related to a situation I've found myself in, and Charlie reminds me of one of my friends to a ridiculous amount of detail. It was just really close to hope.
And I love that line: "We were infinite."

"POST OFFICE" - Charles Bukowski
It took me the first few chapters to get used to the narrator's voice in this novel, because Bukowski's writing style is so unusual, as well as him using a certain amount of what I guess was jargon, but all of that's a good thing and once I did this novel was really good and like nothing I've read before. I ended up liking Henry Chinaski in a twisted kind of way, despite how unkind and lazy and for want of a better word, pathetic he is - I think there's maybe a little bit of him in all of us. A great summation of the "white trash" culture, from a point of view I haven't come across much before.

WHITTARD'S TEA: DREAMTIME
I think I've expressed my love for ridiculously sweet instant tea drinks before. Apricot and honey flavour. Perfect if you have a cold. www.whittards.com. I believe they deliver.

PENGUINS
It was actually from a Laura Marling concert the other night that I learnt that here you can watch penguins at a zoo in California via live webcam. I don't really think I need to explain why this is amazing.

PETE ROE
If you hear from me anywhere else on the internet you probably know this, but I went to see Laura Marling last week... possibly three times. I'm broke but it was brilliant and worth it, and one of the guys who opened for her was Mr Pete Roe, who also plays piano and guitar in her band later on in the set. He's a really great guitarist, by the third night, I could sing along with several of his songs. I think this one below is my favourite of his.



I don't think he's released any music yet, but I'm sure it won't be long.

***

Sorry for forgetting Wednesday again. I won't make promises but we'll see what happens next week...
Aside from that, I hope all's well your end and I'll be back soon.

Lizzie x

Christmas Playlist

Some Christmas songs you maybe haven't heard before...

"I KNOW WHO TOOK THE MILK AND THE COOKIES" - KINA GRANNIS
A song about coming home.




COVER OF "FAIRYTALE OF NEW YORK" - BILLY BRAGG AND FLORENCE WELCH
"Fairytale of New York" is one of my favourite Christmas songs, and nothing beats the original but these two have really great voices and the mandolin part is lovely. Plus Florence and harps go together like... um. Suncream and skin.



"JUST FOR NOW" - IMOGEN HEAP
Beautiful layered harmonies, words about family feuds and false smiles and kicks under the Christmas dinner table.




"THERE'S ALWAYS CHRISTMAS" - ARDIE COLLINS
With a guitar rhythm that's kind of woefully cheerful, a song about a faltering relationship at Christmas time.




"TIMSHEL" - MUMFORD AND SONS
This is not exactly a Christmas song, but it reminds me of Christmas time and mountains, water, snow. I was torn between posting this or "Winter Winds", both sound like Christmas does. But this is so melancholy, both comforting and very cold.




"GOODBYE ENGLAND" - LAURA MARLING
Again, more a wintery song than a Christmas song but it feels like Christmas to me. I wanted to find a video of her playing this in a cathedral like when I saw her (I'm currently trying to get up to date on blogs about concerts from October) but couldn't. Hearing it with just her and a guitar, in a big dark, cathedral, was really magic. But this version is lovely too.

An Oppositional Reading

"An Oppositional Reading." A term everyone uses quite a lot in my Media Studies class, meaning the consumer of a text has a completely different interpretation of the meaning behind the text that its producer intended (as opposed to the more obvious interpretation, the Preferred Reading). It's often because of religion, sexuality, lifestyle choices, or perhaps most importantly, personal experience.

The example of this I remember from class is two people having an argument about James Blunt's song "Goodbye My Lover". The first argues the Preferred Reading - "This song is about someone going through a breakup."
But the second says, "I know why you think that, but it's actually about somebody who stepped on an insect and they're really guilty about it."
Obviously "Goodbye My Lover" isn't about an insect at all, but this person has a really traumatic experience and they're so desperate to find something to relate it to that they grab at the nearest thing to find similarity and comfort in.

The insect thing is a really bad example, but this whole theory is really interesting to me, especially as a music fan and somebody who often tries to find things within the lyrics of a song. The problem with the example above is that it makes it seem as if any Oppositional Reading is obvious, obscure and insane, which isn't the case. Thinking about it, I realised people have them all the time.

A few months ago, my dad was starting to like Noah and the Whale, one of my favourite bands, and we would listen to them a lot when it was just him and me in the car, and his favourite song of theirs was "Tonight's the Kind of Night". I remember one of the first things he said about it was, "It's about a boy leaving home to go to university."

It made me smile. I can see where he's coming from, "Tonight's the Kind of Night" talks of a young boy getting on a bus to leave. "Tonight's the kind of night where everything could change." "He waves goodbye to the town he grew up him, he knows that he'll never go back." "Tonight he's not gonna come back home." "His heart is full of perfect joy, his eyes begin to flood." He's going away from where he's always lived, moving away from his parents and his family, and it's an adventure.

My dad grew up in Bolton, an area that was quite a tight-knit community, and left there at eighteen to go to university and from what I know I think he loved it there: he met some of his current best friends there, did really well in his degree, was in a band etc.

Him leaving to go and live in Coventry is easily relatable to "Tonight's the Kind of Night", because it's about a boy of age eighteen-ish leaving home, but if you think about it there's no reason he should think it's about going to university. It's either an easy assumption to make about somebody student-aged, or my dad just subconsciously applied this to himself and his memories.

I've done it myself, too. There's a song on Laura Marling's new record* called "The Beast". After I'd listened to it a few times I started to really focus on the lyrics, and I thought I'd found it and someone was finally talking about this thing that causes all of my guilt and rage. It's probably more complicated than that, it's difficult to explain because I don't understand it either - Poppy referred to this unexplainable negativity as my "monsters" before, and "The Beast" also seemed a good way to put at it. I really recognised the illustration of the guilt and dread as something that comes at night and lies beside you in bed, and that sometimes you submit to.

I've thought about it and she probably isn't referring to that, at least not specifically, and it's childish that the identification of what I thought was a common ground increased my love for Laura Marling's music. I think it's likely that "The Beast" is about similar feelings, but probably not that "snap!" exactness that I thought I'd found the first time around.

Does it mean we should stop listening to songs and applying them to our lives? Is an "Oppositional" reading any less of an interpretation? Of course not. That is one of the things music is for, a comfort blanket and a friend, a lifeline in the dark because somebody else has probably felt like this before.

I don't know who Imogen Heap wrote "Swoon" about, but I know who it will always have been about to me, the feelings it stirred in me, and for that I can give the song a name and a face. "The Beast" will still always be a description of someone having similar feelings to mine, "Tonight's the Kind of Night" makes my dad think of things that were happening to him when he was eighteen.

A song's story starts with the thing that happened or the person that it was written about, but once it's out in the world and provides a listener with emotion suddenly it's about them to and thousands of stories are unknowingly interlinked. I think that's an incredible representation of the music community. And that's why of course "Goodbye My Lover" by James Blunt is about a squashed insect.

*I hope nobody's counting how many times I've said "Laura Marling" in the past month...

All Is Fleeting

I had a solid idea of what I wanted to write about today, but I'll save it because right now it seems very important that I share this with you:



Charlie Fink and Laura Marling play "Give A Little Love" and "Alas I Cannot Swim" together in the back of a taxi. I think she must have been around seventeen at this time.

I put "Give A Little Love" on before purely for the lyric all is fleeting. A while before that I'd read something on someone's tumblr post about the value of life, and it made me feel quite guilty because of how I'd been thinking lately.

I turned it off because it was brilliant but didn't seem quite right, and it was the same when I saw Noah and the Whale on Thursday and they opened with "Give A Little Love". They're an amazing band live, passionate and energetic and open, but the first time I heard "Give A Little Love" was this video, and because of that I think of it a little differently.

I've found that with the community of music involving Laura Marling, Noah and the Whale and Mumford and Sons, all of who's music has become a part of my life these last few months - everybody seems to think they know quite a lot about their lives, specifically love-lives, during a certain time. I go between thinking it's interesting to listen to a song and have an idea who or what it is about, to thinking that it's possibly interferring and unhealthy to feel like we have access to this, or have opinions about who should or shouldn't still be together, things like that. These aren't people we know and they don't know us and it doesn't seem quite right.

But I think seeing this, it's okay to watch it with the feeling that this isn't a concert or a performance, not really, but two people in love and in coversation. Music is a platform for connection, not necessarily just for artist to fan, and music is a communion in many different ways. Charlie and Laura. Years ago, looking at each other and singing about how they feel.

Salinas, where the women go forever, and they never, ever stop to ask why

Today, in Maida Vale studies, London, Laura Marling recorded a set of fifteen songs for a studio audience which will be broadcast on BBC Radio 2, next Thursday at 8pm.

And I was there. My dad applied for tickets a while ago, mainly because he knows I love Laura Marling and it was free, but didn't think we'd actually get them - only two hundred were released. I didn't want to tell a lot of people when we got them, because the ticket states it does not guarentee admission (they release more than there are places avaliable, just to ensure seats are filled I guess).

So, to make sure we got in, we left the house for London at 10am. I love being in the car and first coming into London, because it reminds me of some of the things that make it my favourite city: the way everything seems sepia toned, even the sky, and the personality and atmousphere it has that I've never lived around.
We arrived at Maida Vale at around 1pm, needless to say there was nobody starting the queue for a show starting in four and a half hours, and one of the staff told us which door to go to and that people probably wouldn't start queuing until at least four thirty. So we drove to Notting Hill, where we made comments about the movie and debated how much of its population were tourists and I looked at small apartment prices (I'm fifteen, yes, but it's where I plan on living after university and it's never too early to start looking). Notting Hill is a beautiful place, full of antique shops and bicycles and hipsters and coloured houses. We also found the Hummingbird Bakery, and I had my very first Hummingbird Brownie which was delicious. I'm sure it's not the last time I'll go there.

We got back to Maida Vale around 2:30, and it was still empty. It looked like we were definitely going to get in but I sat down next to the door and decided to start the queue myself, albeit three hours early, because there was no reason not to, and I read "The Radleys" for a while and it was four o clock before anybody else joined me in the queue (my dad went for a walk). Yes, I am an overenthusiastic fan.

By half five, the they let us in, the queue had extended to still only about sixty. They gave us stickers when our tickets were validated with our line number on, and I am the very proud owner of ticket number one!

A few moments before we went through the door I saw a small blonde woman smoking a cigarette going through the second door, and I wondered but I wasn't entirely sure...

Then we went into Maida Vale studios, Studio 3, actually, and the set-up I would say was kind of like a cafe - there was no actual platform for the stage, just one half of the room, and the audience sat on tables and chairs with little "electronic candles" on them. We were really close to the front... I mean literally, about four metres from where the central microphone was, and we shared the table with a guy and his girlfriend, who'd seen Laura Marling three years ago when she was touring with Noah and the Whale. I was very jealous.

They were playing pre-recorded BBC Radio 2 in the background and "Tonight's The Kind of Night" came on.

A BBC representative came up and told us that Jo Whiley would be coming on stage soon, and to cheer enthusiastically and things because it would be audible on the radio show next week. Then Jo Whiley appreared, and everyone did cheer enthusiastically, and she said that Laura and her band were in the corridor. At this point there were only about 80 people in the audience, maybe less.

And then, very suddenly, Laura Marling and her band were walking onto the stage and everyone cheered and by this point I was trembling slightly because one of my heroines was literally stood about three/four metres from me.

She was wearing a grey jumper and jeans, just like the girl I'd seen outside.

Laura is twenty-one years old, very blonde and very small with dark eyes and probably one of the most beautiful human beings I've been in the prescence of.

The first song she played was "Rambling Man" (unfortunatley it was spoilt for me because I saw the setlist stuck to the stage) and it was lovely. She has a really odd stage presense - it shouldn't seem lively or anything, because she's quite small and stands still looking distant and staring upwards sometimes. It's so intense just to watch, seeing someone doing something they're so caught up in that it's almost as if they're not quite there.

Which is a brilliant skill, seeing as at the same time she's singing beautifully and being a complete genius guitarist. Her band was made up of a second guitarist who also played piano, a cellist, mandolin, banjo, trumpet, a double bass and a really good drummer.

Oh, and I got the setlist!:



Here is the exciting part.

Afterwards, I asked my dad if we could wait outside for a little while to see if she came out. And he is used to this, as is Poppy or anyone who's been to a few concerts with me, but I've never ended up meeting anyone or waiting that long.

We stood outside the front door for around five minutes, nobody else was, honestly I didn't think I'd see her. It sounds stupid but then I saw her reflection in a car or something, and as that happened my dad came from where he was waiting with the car, saying "Lizzie she's there! Quick!".

She was coming out with some other people, and for about three seconds I was scared to approach and I just went still. And then I said "Laura," and sort of came towards her quietly shaking and took out my copy of "Alas I Cannot Swim" and I asked if she'd sign it and found a pen. She asked my name, and then if it was spelt with a "y" or an "ie".

I felt slightly less dumbly starstruck seeing her and realising it felt a bit like being around someone I know and also like being around a superhero. I said something like "Well done, it was magic." and she said thank you and asked about how we got the tickets. I told her. Then my dad came and joined in the conversation and told her about how we're seeing her at Manchester Cathedral next month. And that was it.

I wish I had a picture of us together but forgot to ask, and besides I think I'd have been embarassed to post it because of how much I'd have looked like crap compared to someone who is so beautiful in person.*

The whole way home, every few minutes, I just came out with "I can't believe I met Laura Marling ____" minutes ago. It will go on for a long time.

To conclude: today was wonderful.
I was ticket number one.
I waited three hours.
I got the setlist.
And I met Laura Marling.

I think I'm too much of a fangirl and don't mind. I also think I won the concert if that's possible.

I'm going to bed now because I have school tomorrow. I just wanted to tell you how amazing today was.

Did I tell you I met Laura Marling?

*I just typed "compared to Hayley G. Hoover."