Frankie Archer has shared her remarkable new single ‘Elsie Marley’.
The performer’s incoming EP ‘Pressure And Persuasion’ is a series of character studies, looking at girlhood and womanhood through the eyes of different individuals. There’s a permanence to it, too, with Frankie commenting…
These stories tell of girlhood and womanhood. Pressures to behave, to speak, to look a certain way… Listen to the parallels between these stories from hundreds of years ago and womens’ experiences right now and think – what’s going on here and why can’t we move on?
New song ‘Elsie Marley’ sums up her approach. A truly other-worldly piece of music, the electronic textures are wrapped around something ancient, and deeply traditional.
The lyric – “Elsie Marley’s grown so fine / she won’t get up to feed the swine / lies in bed til 8 or 9” – captures a woman some 250 years ago, while the video (directed by Frankie Archer) takes you the present day.
The songwriter comments…
“Elsie Marley was a well loved landlady who had all the gossip, all the booze and knew how to have a good time. She’s someone I look up to because she knows her worth and isn’t gonna fall into that never-ending grind of work: ‘Elsie Marley’s grown so fine / she won’t get up to feed the swine / lies in bed til 8 or 9’. You go, Elsie.”
“With this tune I wanted it to be a really satisfying slow-head-nodding track, which is a bit of a palette cleanser on the EP. You don’t need to stress, just sit back and let the deep plodding bass and tinkling fiddle wash you along. I also (as usual) put some manipulated vocal textures in there, using an LFO on my sampler to create a tremolo effect. There’s also some random stuff in there – like something called ‘medical A’ which is a tiny slice of a fiddle note re-pitched an octave up and then an octave down by a different plugin, it just kind of glitches the sound. These little things are hidden all through Elsie Marley.”
Tune in now.
‘Pressure And Persuasion’ EP will be released on October 4th.
Photo Credit: Rob Irish
