Beth Orton - Sugaring Season

Beth Orton - First new album in six years finds the British songwriter and 90's "folk-tronica" pioneer in a reflective but no less daring mood, thanks to a rich, organic sound brought on by acclaimed producer Tucker Martine (Decemberists, Tift Merritt) and a heavenly studio backing band including jazz drummer Brian Blade and guitarists Marc Ribot and Ted Barnes // Release: Sugaring Season (October 2, ANTI-) // Sounds like: 70's British folk/rock mainstays like Pentangle and Fairport Convention along with mid-period Joni Mitchell melody-meets-atmospherics (and distinctive guitar tunings) seep into the mix of shimmering acoustic songcraft and moods of quiet, soulful reflection (all on display in the gorgeous "Mystery" and "Poison Tree")...Orton's sorrowful voice has never sounded so intimate and vulnerable, embracing the little cracks and imperfections that give her songs an undeniable immediacy and appeal...

Quote: "I stretched myself as a singer on this record and used voices I never have before as a writer. A lot of the writing on this record happened in the dead of night, when spiders mend their webs, with an infant asleep in the next room... as a result, my writing became a secret again: illicit and my own." What we like: the sense that Sugaring Season is truly a collaborative effort -- Orton, Martine and band -- is born out in the meticulous and dramatic interplay throughout the album, an effort even more remarkable when we learn that most of the album was recorded live off the floor with a minimum of overdubs or additions...the use of string arrangements is subtle but effective, giving songs like "Last Leaves of Autumn" a lush chamber-folk feel...

Beth Orton - "Mystery" (from Sugaring Season)

Beth Orton - "Something More Beautiful" (from Sugaring Season)

Photo Credit: Jo Metson Scott

For 'Sugaring Season," Orton and Martine have brought together a dream band of new and old friends: keyboardist Rob Burger, bassist Sebastian Steinberg, and legendary jazz drummer Brian Blade, along with guitarists Marc Ribot and Ted Barnes and folksinger Sam Amidon. The album was recorded predominantly live on the floor as the band reflected and internalized Beth's disparate inspirations, from Roberta Flack's 'First Take' album to Pentangle's folk-jazz collisions. The songs range across styles from deeply soulful to effortless and breezy, with open-tuned guitars, pensive pianos, and modal grooves underpinning her emotional weathervane of a voice.

While Orton has shifted away from the electronic textures that dominated her early work, her music is still built upon an implicit groove, even if it emanates from her acoustic guitar rather than from a sequencer. "It may not be a 'dance' beat," she says, "but it's definitely there and it's earthed and primal and insistent."

Beth Orton is a BRIT Award-winner and two-time Mercury Prize nominee who has collaborated with Bert Jansch, Emmylou Harris, Beck, Jim O'Rourke, Terry Callier, and Ryan Adams among others. Her last album, 2006's 'Comfort of Strangers,' was called "unerringly lovely" by SPIN and "her most accomplished record to date" by Uncut.

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Five years ago, Beth Orton was unsure she would ever make a record again.
Going deeper into her art, her craft, Orton wasn’t concerned whether the songs
she was writing would be heard by anyone else. She certainly wasn’t envisioning
that a few years later they would make up Sugaring Season, arguably the most
important album of her career.

The roots of Sugaring Season began in a “cow barn” at the end of a dirt lane in
Norfolk in the summer of 2007. Orton, having split from her label and raising an
infant daughter on her own, packed up her life in London and moved back to
where she was from. “I was on my own, challenged like I had never been, with
few resources,” explains Orton.

So she did what she knew best: she played. “It was a long summer, and I set up
a little studio in the back garden and just got deeper into what I was making.
Singing in different voices, messing around with my guitar,” says Orton. While
pregnant, Orton had begun taking weekly guitar lessons from her friend and
collaborator, folk legend Bert Jansch, who introduced her to the alternate guitar
tunings which were a minor revelation for the singer.

After years of touring and living a public existence, suddenly she was isolated
and away from the life she had known thus far, which allowed her to incubate her
work with no expectations of the end results. “I was truly doing it just for myself.”
Orton’s first song “Water From A Vine Leaf,” her 1993 collaboration with William
Orbit, had become a hit and effectively launched Orton’s career. From that time,
every song she’d made was public, born into the audience. Now her work was
entirely her own, a secret she was keeping to herself.

Orton recalls it as a painful but pivotal time. Nevertheless she was inspired by the
natural world around her, her new family and what she had picked up in her
weekly visits to Jansch.

Upon returning to Norfolk, Orton had begun a tacit collaboration with old friends,
which brought about an epiphany.

Spending the summer quietly woodshedding while her daughter slept
fundamentally changed something in Orton, the bedrock of her life had shifted
and who she was as an artist had evolved. She had the experience of becoming
a mother and “meanwhile, I was finding a whole world within my guitar.” The
songs “Dawn Chorus,” about being awakened by the breeze, and Orton’s tribute
to her daughter, “See Through Blue,” were both written during those early barn
days.

Orton began setting aside time every day for working on her songwriting. “That’s
what came of having children. It forced me to make time, to make it a discipline,”
says the singer. “It was my only time for myself, because as a parent, you are
constantly interrupted by someone who has needs greater than yours.”

Equally she found herself writing in the dead of night, often after being woken up
or while the house was silent and all were asleep. By the time her daughter was
three, Orton had a significant cache of songs from her many and varied writing
sessions. With the help and encouragement of her (then soon-to-be) husband,
the singer-songwriter Sam Amidon, Orton began to revisit, finish and finesse
some of tracks she’d amassed. His encouragement renewed Orton’s spirit. “He
must have heard my quiet ambitions whispering out my ears while I slept,” she
says, laughing. He was insistent, prodding her back onto the path.

Along the way, Orton had become fearless in her pursuit of her muse and deeply
devoted to her songwriting process. “The truth was I had held onto some hope,
that I might one day put these songs out. There was a strong voice that was
always fighting the doubt.”

Around this time Orton struck a deal with ANTI- and her honed tracks were ready
to be put to tape. An admirer of Tucker Martine’s work on his wife Laura Viers’
Carbon Glacier, Orton reached out to him and found that the producer was
receptive the artistic parameters of Orton’s inspirations, Roberta Flack’s First
Take and Pentangle’s The Pentangle. Martine helped assemble a studio band
with just 5 days scheduled for recording the basic tracks.

The core ensemble – Orton, drummer Brian Blade, bassist Sebastian Steinberg,
and keyboardist Rob Burger, augmented by either Sam Amidon or Ted Barnes
on second acoustic guitar – played live on the floor, with an increasingly
heightened sense of excitement and musical exchange as each new song was
tackled. "We walked into the room, some of us meeting for the first time, others
old friends, and started to record." There were no charts, no click tracks, with the
players hearing the songs for the first time as they played. Martine captured
everything to tape as it happened, and many moments on the album reflect the
true spontaneity of the moment: the take of “Candles” that appears on the album,
for example, is not even a ‘first take’ but actually is the rehearsal take, where the
musicians were playing along to learn the song without realizing that the machine
was rolling.

The resulting album is the culmination of Orton finding herself as a guitarist and a
songwriter. Sugaring Season is Orton’s purest artistic statement to date. “I like
being older and not feeling like I have to contain my work.” For Orton, the
album’s title serves as a metaphor for the epic but internal and transformative
process behind its making. “Sugaring Season is about the time of year when the
trees are tapped for maple syrup. It takes a lot of sap to make a little bit of syrup.
But what makes the sap sweet and what makes it flow are these long, cold nights
alternating with those ever so slightly warmer days - beauty and melancholy
mixed together - and after that, that’s when the sweetness comes.”