The cliché goes “it’s a hard act to follow.” Such was the case for Mandolin Orange who broke out with 2016’s Blindfaller, which spawned high profile festival appearances and sold-out worldwide tours. The personal and intimate was present there as it’s been on all the albums done by the North Carolina duo of singer-songwriter Andrew Marlin and multi-instrumentalist Emily Franz. This time, on Tides Of A Teardrop, it is more potent than ever. There’s a magical kind of beauty in that title that’s reflective of the music. The harmony between the two is captivating and eminently listenable; it’s easy to detect the seamless teamwork and understand why they’ve been so successful. Theirs is an airy sound, crystalline clear like splinters of sunlight in a hushed forest.
This album started out as most of theirs did with Andrew carrying the songwriting in a stream of consciousness style with Emily serving as a sounding board when needed. However, as Marlin continued to sharpen his songs, a realization hit. Hints of loss have been around the edges of their music because Marlin lost his mother at the age of 18. He points to that event as being the major catalyst for his writing, perhaps as a means of escape at that time. It was his outlet. Frantz agrees. “We’ve talked about how grief and loss, in general, have always been present in our songs because of that. But this album, and this group of tunes, seems to take on Andrew’s specific loss of his mom a lot more directly.”
The songs are quiet and simple in structure, often just two instruments and two voices in a style that lies somewhere between bluegrass and folk. Yet, their songs have sneaky, deceptive emotional power, especially when realizing how direct they can be. Take, for example, these lyrics from “Suspended in Heaven” – “Mother is gone, her journey’s unending/She’s leaving this shore for the sea of all-knowing.” The song was written around Mother’s Day of this past year and became, in their minds, the linchpin of the album. Arguably, it’s the most straight-ahead bluegrass song, not unlike “The Fields Have Turned Brown” with the most glorious harmonies. It hearkens back to their early days as a duo and is the closest they’ve come to penning and singing a true Appalachian hymn.
While they did start as a duo, they began to enlarge the sound as touring demands grew. They worked for the first time with the group of musicians on Blindfaller. This has broadened their scope and increased the feedback in terms of how the songs are structured, where to put the spaces, where to build and where to change the dynamics. The patience is admirable. None of the musicians rushed to a solo or oversteps their bounds. It’s a tight ensemble that can audibly sigh in the pregnant pauses of “Late September,” or mimic the sway of an infant’s cradle on “Mother Deer.” It makes the listener wish one could be a fly on the wall to witness the eye contact between the musicians. The spaces are purposeful, symbolic of loss and connoting spirituality. For all we know, perhaps certain magic happened during the recording where all were just telepathically in synch. Music has its own force. Maybe you feel it too.
