Buzzin Music

Tracey Thorn - Love And Its Opposite

Tracey Thorn – Love And Its Opposite is released on Strange Feeling Records.

Tracey Thorn began her music career in 1980 as a member of The Marine Girls before meeting Ben Watt at Hull University and together forming Everything But The Girl.

Together they had success throughout the 1980s and 1990s with songs like the jazz-influenced Each & Every One and Todd Terry’s remix of Missing.  They finally split up in 2002 and Tracey turned her attention to raising a family while Ben Watt turned his hand to becoming a successful and well respected Deep House DJ and also formed the Buzzin Fly Record Label.

Love And It’s Opposite is Tracey Thorn’s third solo album and is instantly recognisable due to her unique warm and velvet voice.

The album is full of life experiences. Love And Its Opposite is a collection of songs that are happy and sad, easy and difficult, dark and light.

Thorn explains: “When I was young, I imagined middle age to be a kind of comfort zone, but in fact, having got here, I now feel it’s more of a war zone. The songs are where I dump all that shit so that I can get on with my life without jumping off a bridge.”

With new experiences to process, she returned to a wave of critical acclaim in 2007 with Out Of The Woods, her first solo album since 1982’s A Distant Shore. Love And Its Opposite represents her next move, and it’s a reunion of sorts with her Everything But The Girl partner Ben Watt, who releases the album through Strange Feeling, a subsidiary of his Buzzin Fly label.

Working once again with Berlin-based producer Ewan Pearson (who collaborated with Tracey Thorn on Out Of The Woods), the album was recorded in London and Berlin, where, Tracey says, “it was born in very humble surroundings. Everything about the first bit of recording was incredibly basic, with me playing everything myself, and on a very limited range of instruments.”

The album’s less sparse moments are populated by a fantastic cast of guest performers, all of who have a personal connection to Tracey Thorn including Hot Chip’s Al Doyle (guitar & bass), The Invisible’s Leo Taylor (drums), singer-songwriter Jens Lekman (guest vocals), Nashville-based singer-songwriter-drummer Cortney Tidwell (backing vocals, drums), and Los Valentinos’s guitarist Jono.

Love And Its Opposite is, says Tracey, “a record about the person I am now and the people around me; about real life after 40.”

A great cover version of Lee Hazelwood’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 included with eight original songs, each of which tackles head-on the realities of life in its middle years, whether marriage and divorce (Long White Dress and Oh, The Divorces!), family ghosts (Kentish Town), confronting life alone (Singles Bar) or the collision of youth and adulthood (Hormones). The album climaxes with Swimming, featuring Cortney Tidwell.

The first single to be taken from the album is Oh, The Divorces!, and is along with Singles Bar, Come on Home To Me and Swimming my favourite tracks from Love And Its Opposite, which is a perfect return for a perfect English Rose.