Whilst Jodie Marie and Samuel Taylor are a young duo they take their inspiration from moments that are familiar to many reading this. They both draw on an image that has endured through the ages inspiring new generations to go and seek more via second hand vinyl and the numerous videos out there on the internet. Marie refers to it as a time when musicians “… got together to play music just because they loved sharing the stage with another artist and it worked really well with that person, like Johnny Cash & June Carter, Bob Dylan & Joan Baez.”
Following Jodie Marie’s touring of critically acclaimed debut “Mountain Echo”, she met up with Samuel Taylor, who she’d shared a stage with on the circuit to write together. “We spent late nights listening through loads of old records. Just showing each other tracks we loved,” explains Taylor. “I’d put on ‘One Too Many Mornings’ by Dylan and Jodie would put on ‘Silver Dagger’ by Joan Baez, I’d play ‘Beeswing’ by Richard Thompson and Jodie would show me ‘Love Has No Pride’ by Bonnie Raitt, and on and on. You can hear the lineage in tracks such as ‘All I Need’, and the timeless production of the set, but there’s nothing contrived about the style in which these two blues obsessives create. “They’re honest songs – we aren’t trying to be retro or vintage but the songs that speak to us are classic and heartfelt and that is what we are trying to be as well.”
Naturally, these songs were brought forth from these late night music sessions – listening and writing as a pure duo, and revealed a lunar theme – sparked from their cover of ‘Bad Moon Rising’ and concluding in their mournful ode to the eclipse of love, ‘Tilt The Moon’.
Recorded entirely in Wales at StudiOwz, located on a working farm which added a unique flavour to the takes – working in harmony with nature and following its cues for when to record, and when to take inspiration from the surroundings. “We recorded some of the drums in the cows’ milking parlour to get the right reverb – it was pretty funny too, every time we pressed record, a cow would moo – without a doubt,” Marie says. The couple would have to adapt to the patterns of nature; “Between 4pm and 6pm every day the milking of the cows would begin,” elaborates Taylor. “We had to stop recording around this time as things got a little noisy in the cowshed next to us. We’d go out walking in the local countryside or down to the beach. I was expecting being in the countryside, but this was a working farm. It was a great experience and a perfect place to be making such a roots-based record.”
This record is a natural introduction – four beautiful songs from a heartfelt friendship for us to share – a glimpse into a romantic world, before the pair stop moonlighting and return to the daylight world of their forthcoming solo records. But as the tides change, and time moves forwards, the pair will no doubt recommence their nocturnal activities.
Their debut EP Tilt the Moon is released August 25 via Dink’s Records
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