Congratulations to Everything But The Girl’s Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt, who tied the knot sometime this year after a long courtship. Said Thorn on her MySpace blog: “A twenty seven year engagement may seem cautious to some of you, but I think in these uncertain times, it is as well to be sure of someone before you make any rash commitments.” (She is a very wise woman.) And to make this bit of news go from “awesome” to “yay-inducing,” it was announced in a post about the songs on her followup to 2007’s masterful Out Of The Woods. (Lots of songs about divorce on the new one, apparently/ironically.) To celebrate all this news, why not watch the heartstring-pulling video for Woods‘ “Raise The Roof”? [Tracey Thorn’s MySpace Blog] More »
Those of you who haven’t picked up the Merge Records-covers-Merge Records edition of the label’s 20th-anniversary collection Score! can get a taste at Tracey Thorn‘s MySpace, where the Everything But The Girl singer teams up with Jens Lekman to perform the Magnetic Fields’ “Yeah! Oh Yeah.” The cover sounds quite lovely, although given the song’s grisly twist, perhaps that isn’t the best adjective to use to describe the whole thing. [MySpace]
The rise of the artist blog as official mouthpiece in 2008 may have been in part because record labels can’t afford to hire decent PR staff anymore, but hey, you take the good with the bad. And there was a lot of good to come out of artists hitting up Tumblr, MySpace, et al; these blogs were really effective at humanizing the vacuum presented by endless paparazzi shots and press releases, whether through “clarity posts,” in which artists put gossips on blast, or posts explaining what life is like when bands graduate to bigger tours, or just posts about how they liked shoes. After the jump, nine examples of why more artists should make a tour stop in Blogtown. Not only is the trip entertaining, its fruits give people like me great material!
The ever-bewitching Tracey Thorn has posted some new music to her MySpace page: the mournful “Overture,” on which Thorn’s rich alto sounds as clear as a bell, is a collaboration between her and the gloomy Hungarian trio The Unbending Trees that’ll appear on the band’s next album, Chemically Happy… More »
And the song at No. 18 wants you to put on your red shoes and take a chance.
Out Of The Woods is the first solo album by Everything But The Girl’s Tracey Thorn since 1982, and it’s quickly shaping up to be one of our favorite albums of the year so far–it’s simultaneously world-weary and beat-heavy, and the opening song sounds like it was plucked from Margo Guryan’s… More »
Part Brazil, part Singin’ In The Rain, this clip for Tracey Thorn’s “It’s All True” eerily resembles daydreams we had during our dreariest cubicle-farm days, although “True” is a much, much better song than anything our fluorescent-addled brain would have come up with back then. More »
Tracey Thorn’s taking a break from Everything But The Girl, but we’re pretty excited for her forthcoming solo record, Out Of The Woods–anyone who describes a song as “a kind of shimmery piece of Scritti Politti-style pop” gets the cocked eyebrow from us. (Okay, yeah, we’re easy that way.) More »