From sinister encounters amid the bustle of Mexico City to reading Soviet-era satire under the Atlas Mountains via an essential stop at Dublin’s premier Leprechaun Museum, Amelia Coburn’s debut album ‘Between The Moon and The Milkman’ is an astonishing collection of songs and stories, all told with the unmistakable profile of Coburn’s North East homeland on the horizon.
The description of Amelia Coburn‘s forthcoming debut album, Between The Moon and The Milkman (due March 8th 2024), would sit well alongside the synopsis for a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami, teasing the strands of real life and mythic to weave folkloric moments. You can see why multi-instrumentalist, producer, string-arranger and composer Bill Ryder-Jones, an artist known for his authenticity and wryness, was so keen to work with Coburn as producer, even if he can’t quite lay his finger on what she is:
“I’ve never in my life worked with someone quite like Amelia and I still can’t quite put my finger on what she is! That’s a compliment by the way – she came in with these incredibly clever, moving songs that just blew me away… It would’ve taken me a day to record just her and her uke but she wanted a bigger sound, so we had a lot of playing around with these arrangements.”
The album rightly heralds an exciting new generation of alt-folk voices, and her new single, When the Tide Rolls In (out tomorrow), is an excellent example of how together they have brought Coburn’s vision for her music to life. From the acoustic opening, the gradual build-up, snap-percussion, and Coburn’s incredible vocals, she hooks you from the start.
Amelia pens: “I tend to open my live sets with When The Tide Rolls In, so it always felt like the opening track on an album. I wrote it in Mexico after a sinister encounter which inspired the slightly unsettling mood. I knew within an hour of Bill working on the piece that he totally understood where the music was coming from, and by the end of the day, it was pretty much in the bag. Many thought working with Bill was an unusual choice, as I am known primarily in the folk world, but knowing the variety and calibre of artists he has worked with as well as his own material, I was confident he could bring something different out of the songs, as he has done here.”
Watch the accompanying video by Michael Sreenan below, which layers the tension of the song by superimposing speeding night lights; When the Tide Rolls In is also our Song of the Day.
The results speak for themselves – it’s an album that should be on everyone’s radar.
Amelia will be announcing her own UK headline tour later this month.
‘Between The Moon and The Milkman’ is out March 8th and available to pre-order now: https://slinky.to/btmatm
Finds Amelia Coburn online:
twitter.com/amelia_coburn
instagram.com/ameliacoburn
facebook.com/ameliacoburn