Billie Marten’s Music Makes Loneliness A Thrill

Billie Marten’s new record, Dog Eared, is a pretty major departure from her prior output. We do not hear a solo, cleanly produced acoustic guitar at any point on it. Our girl got an electric axe, a chorus pedal, a few more people, and did not look back. And I’m not judging! It’s delightful. The record has the sound that tumbling down a flight of stairs in a Dr. Seuss book might have. It wants to maximize the whimsy found in its sadness, which requires a rather particular mindset. While the sound is quite different, Marten’s writing typically conveys a loneliness that can rend your soul. Some people make music for being in bed with someone else. She makes music for being in bed all by yourself.

Back to me. The woman who introduced me to Billie Marten some years back did so while we were theoretically sharing a bed, though in hindsight I think I may have just been a way to get out of the house for her. She was living with her ex-boyfriend and his parents, but claimed to have seen the light and realized she was a lesbian. She told me (unprompted) that she wasn’t ready to start a new relationship until she moved out of the house of the old one. Then she hit me up out of the blue a few months down the line to alert me that she was now dating another man. I wish I could say that shit like this still fucked me up, but it doesn’t really—not because I think being used to this sort of thing is bad or a sign of the times, but just because I really enjoy getting in my feelings every now and again.

Thankfully, that girl had great taste in music. Billie Marten rips me apart proper. She speaks to all the little voids and insecurities I have, even when I’m handling things well. In “Clover,” she croons, “I’m way above the atmosphere / I stare at cracks, till they appear.” Even when there is no real serious heartbreak being experienced or even imagined, a worrywart like me can still make herself plenty miserable.

The lead single, “Feeling,” is a masterpiece. I saw a post recently about how some ancient civilization would keep records by telling a kid a bunch of important information, telling them to focus hard, and then tossing them into the river, because strong emotions preserve details in memory really well, and getting thrown in the river is scary. I have no idea if it’s true, but boy, is this song an argument to the strength of emotional memory.

A fun thing about albums now is that most of them are already out by the time they officially come out. I’m real excited for Luvcat’s deranged Vicious Delicious to drop on Halloween, and I know it’s deranged because six of the 13 tracks can be listened to right now, three months before release. Still, Dog Eared was even more extreme: Of its 10 tracks, fully half of them were already available before release. “No Sudden Changes” was one of the later additions to the collection. The lyrics are miserable, with an almost despondent neediness about them, which contrasts hard with the backing track of lazy, funky synths that seem to almost be making fun of the other pieces of the song. “I am the dust in the breeze / I am tugging at your sleeve,” the chorus moans, with this sad little riff behind it. There’s a beat for comedic timing, and then the organ sound wheezes to life, mocking the chorus for all its drama.

Still, of the songs that were released Friday, “The Glass” is my favorite. For my money, it’s the best song on the whole record. The sound is spooky, almost conspiratorial, reminding me a little bit of “I’ve Got To See You Again” by Norah Jones. But where that song is like, horny, “The Glass” is utterly empty, with lines like “Watch the day go through a day.” Few songs I’ve heard have so captured the horror of the kind of emotionless depression you get when your body cannot stand to feel any more. Near the middle of the song there are two whole rests, and she counts the second one out loud, whispering but not hiding. It’s ingenious, and really adds into the feeling that she’s mourning the intrigue that has abandoned her.

I was delighted by this new, playful sound from Marten. It fits surprisingly well with her subject matter, and it’s always nice to mix it up, even when it doesn’t sound this good. I kind of love when artists try something really different. Sometimes a new medium is what we need to get a fresh creative push. If the new shit ain’t your thing, the old shit is still there.