One of the most enduring English singer/songwriters since the early '80s, Tracey Thorn began making music with the all-female quartet Marine Girls, a minimalist pop group that released a pair of albums. She also recorded A Distant Shore, a relatively moody, if similarly skeletal solo album, for Cherry Red in 1983. Around that time she met Ben Watt -- who was also signed to Cherry Red -- and formed a partnership as Everything But the Girl. From 1984 through 1999, Thorn and Watt released ten albums that shifted from indie pop to slick sophisti-pop to downtempo club music.
Shortly after having twin daughters together, they put EBTG on ice. After several years of inactivity, Thorn began writing again and recorded her second solo album, Out of the Woods, which was released in early 2007. Throughout the years, she has guested on songs by a number of groups, including the Style Council, the Go-Betweens, Massive Attack, and Tiefschwarz.
Tracey Thorn's third solo album, Love & Its Opposite, is out May 17, and capitalises on the critical acclaim of her 2007 release, Out Of The Woods, a mixture of hard-edged dance music and folk fare which bridged the gap between the acoustic and the electric. Love & Its Opposite finds Tracey and producer Ewan Pearson stripping things back to more organic essentials, embracing a retro sound that references the type of music she would have grown up listening to. Thorn is in pensive mood for much of the album, which is as much about her own experiences as a forty-something trying to make sense of her life as it is about the relationships of others, resulting in a mature and often cynically humorous set of songs that’s sure to be embraced by her stalwart fans.
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