Photo credit: Kendall Bailey
Mandolin Orange
There’s a gentle, unassuming charm to Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz’s music that engraves their burbling folk and bluegrass melodies with a warm no-bullshit facade. Such has been the duo’s manner since forming in Chapel Hill, N.C., a decade ago and authoring six albums of tender ache, rapturous harmonies and lithe, keenly arranged Americana that belies Mandolin Orange’s demure, paint swatch-worthy moniker.
Their efforts have been delivered with accelerating assurance, culminating in last year’s Tides of a Teardrop. The duo enlisted their usual touring band in the album’s creation, woodshedding a batch of intensely personal songs about loss, several directly related to the loss of Marlin’s mother when he was 18.
The album builds upon the foundations of 2016’s Blindfaller, on which they made a conscious effort to open up the arrangements, affording more room for air and live experimentation. With Tides, it all gels and coalesces, enabling it to crack five Billboard charts at once (Album, Country, Rock, Folk, Heatseekers) and fashioning a fitting conclusion to a decade’s work.
“It's kind of wild to think that it all started in a Tex-Mex restaurant,” Marlin chuckles. “Now we're playing rooms much larger than we ever thought we would—we did two nights at the Ryman in Nashville!”
From the diaphanous breeze-laden lilt of “Into the Sun” to the spare, almost cosmically spacious “Mother Dear,” and the beautiful simmering album-opener “Golden Embers,” Tides of a Teardrop feels both timeless and weightless, a scent or a feeling suffused with foreboding that lingers and haunts, like a chronic ache. That evolving openness or flexibility keys their latest efforts.
“Leaving those progressions kind of open—even if it’s a little more intricate and maybe has a longer form to it, with a few more chords to it… [allows] me to explore the space within those progressions and not just stick to a certain melody,” Marlin explains. “[Now] we have freedom to move around within that progression and change what we’re doing based on our feelings and to really utilize empty space… to where there’s less searching and more just intention.”
It’s surprising at first to discover that Marlin was initially a metalhead and came late to roots music, discovering traditional American music through heavyweight players Tony Rice and Norman Blake, prompting his move to mandolin.
“My approach to metal was very technical and leaning on understanding the fretboard,” he says. “So, to see people do that with old-time music and bluegrass, it exploded my mind that they were able to bring so many fresh ideas to such a traditional style of music.”
Yet, it may be the way Frantz and Marlin’s vocals intertwine that’s the most alluring aspect of the band’s sound. It’s also the least considered. “It wasn’t a vision at all, it’s just something that happened,” Marlin says. “We were both pretty taken back with how easy it was for us to sing together, and that’s the way it’s been ever since the beginning.”
If it ain’t broke…
Mandolin Orange performs at the Pabst Theater on Wednesday, Jan. 29, at 8 p.m.
