Tracey Thorn Returns

BY: Rudie Obias

For nearly four decades, English singer/songwriter Tracey Thorn sustained her career as a musician and writer through re-invention, collaboration, and honesty. Her new album Record is a culmination of her style and work, as she creates songs for the dancefloor and lecture halls, or as she puts it, the album contains a few “feminist bangers.”

She started her music journey in the 80s, in the bands Stern Bops and Marine Girls, where she combined punk rock styles with feminism and her political ideals. “Punk and post-punk were all quite political, feminism was in the air,” Thorn told the late Bernadette McNulty from the UK’s iNews. “Even Bananarama were wearing dungarees. There was a normality to being a feminist and you could be fun and cute but not have to be overly sexual. I have watched that change. I have seen in music that the pressure on women to be overtly sexual is ever stronger.”

Tracey Thorn continued to evolve her style with the electronic/trip hop duo Everything But The Girl in the mid-80s through the early 2000s. Moreover, Everything But The Girl really saw a lot of success in the album Amplified Heart and the hit single “Missing,” which peaked at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1994.

Tracey Thorn also collaborated with the likes of Massive Attack before pursuing a deeper solo career in 2007. Which brings us to her latest album Record, which she wrote as a statement as an artist and a woman living during the Donald Trump era. In fact, she returned to recording music again after a six-year hiatus after attending the Women’s March in January 2017. She felt rejuvenated and galvanized to create music and even brought in a few women to collaborate, namely Corinne Bailey Rae, Shura, and Jenny Lee Lindberg and Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint.

“I just got into a mood that this would be a good time to make a record, as a response to the political misery everywhere,” Tracey Thorn told iNews. “I could feel I was getting sucked in to that. So I thought what can I do? I’m not an activist, I make records. So that is what I did, partly to make myself feel better but also to contribute something positive to the world.”

Record is also a statement of Tracey Thorn’s convictions when it comes to performing live. She doesn’t. She quit performing after she had her three children in 1998. Thorn married her other half in Everything But The Girl, musician Ben Watt in 2008 — 27 years after their relationship started in 1981.

Tracey Thorn is first and foremost a writer before a live performer, as she described her style of writing to iNews, “I am a natural minimalist. I love editing and crossing out. I like to be as concise as possible. I am not an overtly poetic writer – you’d have to search long and hard to find a simile. I’m not descriptive, but being concise is useful in pop songs. If I have a skill it is that I am good at crafting concise phrases that convey meaning.”

Record is out now on Merge Records and is available on Spotify and Apple Music.