"It's direct and honest and real," Marnie Stern says of her upcoming, self-titled album in a press release. "I’m no longer taking cover under guitar lines or yelping vocals." It's an odd assertion, akin to if Miles Davis had put out a statement saying on his next record he was "no longer going to hide behind this whole trumpet thing." Shredded guitars and yelped vocals are the very foundation of Stern's music, so what would a Marnie Stern album sound like with them toned down?
"For Ash," Marnie Stern's opener and first single from the record, released online today, gives some clues. It opens like most Stern songs, with a blaze electric guitars and Stern's manic cheerleader wails, but the chaos soon subdues as Stern begins to sing about ex-boyfriend who committed suicide. Stereogum gave the background behind the story in an excellent profile of Stern from February:
She was in a songwriting rut when she found out about his death. The news shook her into overdrive. “I wasn’t thinking about myself, I was thinking about him. I stayed up for like three days working on that song. And it was sort of… I mean, I’m no hippie, but it was kind of like a trance-like thing. It was so upsetting and so powerful,” she says. But the song itself isn’t dark, or slow, so she doesn’t see a problem playing it live someday. “I guess I feel like I cared about this person so incredibly much, that I wish I had a hundred songs that I could sing every night about him.”
That obvious affection for her ex comes across in the song, which mostly avoids sentimentality, save for its most wistfully delivered line: "I miss your smile." This newly direct and honest Marnie Stern seems to be quite a potent songwriter.
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Marnie Stern comes out on Oct. 5 through Kill Rock Stars. "For Ash" is embedded below, and available for legal download here.
