Renowned for her work as part of legendary alt-pop duo Everything But The Girl (1982-2000), Tracey Thorn returns with her starkly beautiful new solo album, Love and Its Opposite, this 14th May on Strange Feeling through Inertia.
From the press release:
Produced by Berlin’s Ewan Pearson (Delphic, Goldfrapp, The Rapture, M83) and featuring guest appearances from Al Doyle (Hot Chip), Leo Taylor (The Invisible), Jens Lekman, Cortney Tidwell and Jono (Lost Valentinos); the album confronts the full unvarnished weight of complex relationships in flux.
“It is a record about the person I am now and the people around me,” says Tracey. “About real life after forty.” Covers of Lee Hazlewood’s “Come On Home To Me” (a duet with Jens Lekman) and “You Are A Lover” by Budapest’s The Unbending Trees (with whom Tracey collaborated in 2008) are added to eight originals that tackle head-on the realities of life in its middle year. The album covers marriage and divorce (“Long White Dress” and “Oh, the Divorces!”); family ghosts (“Kentish Town”); confronting life alone (“Singles Bar”); and the collision of youth and adulthood (“Hormones”).
Backtracking, it is hard to find a decade recently where Tracey Thorn’s songwriting has not been influential. Often overlooked by those who choose to focus on her uniquely sensual yet confessional voice, her direct, unadorned stories have cut through to find many revered supporters. Fresh out of school in the UK in the early 1980s, she formed the cult girl band Marine Girls, whose two-album career of edgy teen love songs has influenced lo-fi indie bands ever since (with professed fans including Kurt Cobain and The XX). Throughout the 1980s, she shared writing with partner (and husband) Ben Watt in the British duo Everything But The Girl (EBTG). In the ’90s, she co-wrote EBTG’s global smash “Missing” before delivering lyrics, melody, and vocals for one of the decade’s seminal ballads, Massive Attack’s “Protection”.
Released on Ben Watt’s Strange Feeling imprint (home to The Unbending Trees and The Figurines), Love And Its Opposite is a humane and truthful collection from one of the U.K’s finest singers and songwriters.
Tracey Thorn’s Love and it’s Opposite is out 14th May on Strange Feeling.
