Beth Orton - Weather Alive [LP]

Through the writing of these songs and the making of this music, I found my way back to the world around me – a way to reach nature and the people I love and care about. This record is a sensory exploration that allowed for a connection to a consciousness that I was searching for. Through the resonance of sound and a beaten up old piano I bought in Camden Market while living in a city I had no intention of staying in, I found acceptance and a way of healing.” Beth Orton describes Weather Alive, her most personal album to date, as “a collaboration with time – of someone struggling to make sense. And in that struggle, something beautiful got made.” For Orton, music re-emerged in the past several years as a tethering force, even when her own life felt more tumultuous than ever. After wrestling with mysterious health issues for years, she turned a major corner in 2014 when at long last she received a correct diagnosis and was able to begin managing her condition with medication. However, Orton found this newfound clarity almost as disempowering as the mystery of her inexplicable illness because it waylaid her sense of self, and when strange occurrences persisted, she was only able to process them through long periods of making music at the upright piano installed in a shed in her garden. These sessions in solitude turned into the eight-track Weather Alive, the first album Orton has self-produced in her 30-year career. The piano spoke to Orton, holding an emotional resonance she wasn’t able to explore with guitar. Indeed, the first notes of the album-opening title track usher the listener into an expansive, emotive and dream-like world of sound with little precedence in Orton’s prior work, and through the writing of these songs and the making of this music, Orton found her way back to the world around her. Orton’s close collaborators on Weather Alive include Tom Skinner (Sons of Kemet, The Smile) on drums and Tom Herbert on bass, with additional players adding nuance and color to the music: Shahzad Ismaily on guitar, drums, harmonica, bass and Moog, Sam Beste on vibraphone, Francine Perry on synths, and Alabaster dePlume on saxophone.