On the heels of her fifth studio album, beloved UK singer/songwriter Billie Marten returns with “Feeling,” a breezy tune exploring the many wonders of youth and young love.
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Stream: “Feeling” – Billie Marten
A new Spring is upon us, and so too is new music from the ever-blossoming Billie Marten.
“Feeling,” the English singer/songwriter’s second single from her upcoming album Dog Eared (due July 18th via Fiction Records), is here, and it is a triumph.
In the summer of 2024, Marten and an all-star team of musicians joined forces with New York-based producer Phil Weinrobe (known for his excellent works with Adrianne Lenker) to record Dog Eared. The musicians performed as one resounding body during these recording sessions, huddling up in a circle with nothing separating them from each other – no studio walls and no equipment other than their instruments. The ending result is an offering of pure, irreclipable creative expression and energy.
“This record feels like what music is supposed to be – a creative dialog between wide open musicians, all pushing in the exact same direction, and that direction is clear – the controls are set for the heart of Billie’s incredible songs,” Weinrobe enthuses.
He follows this, saying, “Yes, the record was recorded live. Yes, Billie sang the lead vocals as it was going down. Yes we were huddled up in a circle – no headphones, no walls, no playback, nothing separating each person from the next, and nothing separating the performers from their performances. But that’s not why this record is a monument. It’s a monument because Billie walked into the studio every morning and opened her mouth and sang these incredible melodies and gorgeous lyrics without any worries or fears or desires to control the art. She was the art. And everyone surrounded her, and lifted her up, and in turn she lifted the music to heights that we are all lucky to get to listen to, on repeat, forever.”
Like a weightless, paperback book spilling open in the wind, Billie Marten has turned a new page. In “Feeling,” we witness Marten at her warmest. It’s the most in love and confident she’s ever sounded. You can practically hear her blushing, as though she’s smiling the whole way through the record.
Through gusts of horns and a buttery soundscape of pianos and steel guitars, “Feeling” has a dreamy tenderness to it that wraps around you, like golden light seeping through your bedroom window in the morning. That’s one of Billie’s gifts: writing songs that feel like pieces of home – pieces you can take with you wherever you go.
Drawing roads into the sand
Falling deep into your hands
Barely grown enough to stand
And looking up at you
And you look so good
And you look so clean
I am on my way
I am in between feeling
– “Feeling,” Billie Marten
“I’ve discovered that I have a really particular long-term memory,” Marten explains. “I have specific sensory recollections from when I was two onwards, that I can recall easily now. One of those is marking out roads in my grandmother’s patterned carpet, for my dad’s old 1950/60s toy cars to drive on. I used to trace patterns in everything: fabric seats at the dentist, carpets, wallpaper and walls, raindrops on car windows. Everything had a pattern to be noticed.”
Marten’s curiosity in the seemingly mundane, paired with her observational eye and knack for social commentary is all a part of what makes her writing hers.
With “Feeling,” she leans fully into her specialities, letting very little, if anything at all, stand in the way of her and the music. The same can be said for the talented musicians accompanying her.
“‘Feeling is really set alight by Núria Graham’s guitar part, the one you hear from the outset,” Marten shares. “It sparks the album into life and really sets the benchmark in terms of rhythm. This is an album of rhythmic focus.”
We are, oh, so lightly here
Softer than a rabbit ear
Watch me as I disappear
Into the great unknown
– “Feeling,” Billie Marten
Billie Marten has found a soft place to land amidst the chaos of the world. She has found love– perhaps with someone, or in herself, with life itself. Perhaps with all the above. And you can hear it soaring through “Feeling” and “Crown” (the first single, released October 11, 2024).
Love is an impossible feeling. It’s something every poet writes about, every singer sings about, every human thinks about in their own attempt to understand it, to preserve it, to mourn it. But when we really look at it, love is rather simple… isn’t it? It asks nothing of us other than one thing: to show up as we are, so that it can meet us where we are.
So too does Billie Marten’s “Feeling” meet us where we are – whether we are here, there, or drifting blissfully somewhere in-between.
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Stream: “Feeling” – Billie Marten
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