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This Event is All Ages
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Billie Marten’s parents did not pretend to like Dog Eared, her fifth album but the first where she begins to tease out the trails and trials of adulthood. They were only two tracks in when a bit of dissonance brushed awkwardly against their ears, 1 minute and 50 seconds into “Crown”—“The minute you are gone/I lose where I belong,” Marten sings, holding that final forlorn note as the band bends slightly away in a sly bit of text painting. They called their daughter and admitted they didn’t really get it. How had the soft-voiced singer who had become a British teenage star gotten here, singing about addictions and neuroses above notes that didn’t seem to make sense? Sure, Marten was disappointed. But there was certainly some degree of delight, too, because it was suddenly clear she’d accomplished what she hoped to do with Dog Eared all along. She had slipped the stereotype of her past and, at last, made more than a merely pretty record.
The first time Marten and producer Phil Weinrobe spoke by phone, sometime in the summer of 2023 as she drove aimlessly through the Yorkshire Dales, they realized they shared a vision for what her next record wouldn’t be: another singer-songwriter album. That is, they didn’t want to recruit a band of beyond-capable aces only to ask them to stay out of the way, to support the songs rather than express themselves. Marten had spent the first decade of her career making music that put her in that silo, and, as she neared her mid-20s, the claustrophobia only intensified. Patient and restrained, full of the space for which she yearned, Dog Eared is her entirely successful first step beyond it and into a record where songs become places for players to interact with Marten, where they tease out in real time what they are trying to say together. Marten’s singing has never been more nuanced or versatile than it is here, her songwriting never more rich or poignant. But on Dog Eared, she is simply and happily the band member who happens to write and sing, surrounded by an elite crew responding as she goes.
Marten loves to leave her mark on a good book—underlining important passages, scribbling ideas in the margins, folding the corners of pages into dog ears to mark her place. The 10 songs of Dog Eared serve that purpose, telling the story of who she was as she wrote and recorded it, cleaving her adolescence from her adulthood in order to move forward. She is the songwriter who finds wisdom in horses and encourages self-reflection while realizing she has barely begun her own. She is the singer who makes the chorus of “Goodnight Moon” as beautiful as a lunar corona and smartly lets dissonance slip between her voice and the band around her as she watches something she loves disappear during “Crown.” (Her parents, mind you, have come around. Dog Eared’s charms are, ultimately, that undeniable.) Marten is a consummate singer-songwriter who has dared to push beyond the limitations of that form and make a stunning record that marks a new page, suggesting what comes next through the strength and beauty of what’s right here.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave, Portland, OR, United States, Oregon 97202
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