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By the time 2019 came to an end, Andrew Marlin knew he was tired of touring. He was grateful, of course, for the ascendancy of Mandolin Orange, the duo he’d co-founded in North Carolina with fiddler Emily Frantz exactly a decade earlier. Their rise—crowds that grew first to fill small dives, then the Ryman, then amphitheaters the size of Red Rocks—humbled Emily and Andrew, who became parents to Ruby late in 2018. They’d made a life of this.
After 2019’s Tides of a Teardrop, a tender accounting of his mother’s early death, the process became evermore arduous, even exhausting. What’s more, those tunes—and the band’s entire catalogue, really—conflicted with the name Mandolin Orange, an early-20s holdover that never quite suited the music they made. Nightly soundchecks, at least, provided temporary relief, as the band worked through a batch of guarded but hopeful songs written just after Ruby’s birth.
“We’re different people than when we started this band,” Marlin says, reflecting on all these shifts. “We’re setting new intentions, taking control of this thing again.”
Those tunes are now Watchhouse, which would have been Mandolin Orange’s sixth album but is instead their first also under the name Watchhouse, a moniker inspired by Marlin’s place of childhood solace. The name, like the new record itself, represents their reinvention as a band at the regenerative edges of subtly experimental folk-rock. Challenging as they are charming, and an inspired search for personal and political goodness, these nine songs offer welcome lessons about what any of us might become when the night begins to break.
Sacramento songwriter Tré Burt’s sophomore album, You, Yeah, You, is a narrated collection of songs featuring a cast of invented characters; heroes, villains, those destitute of salvation and those seeking it. This is Burt’s second release on Oh Boy Records, the label founded by the late John Prine who signed the songwriter in the fall of 2019. On You, Yeah, You, Burt teamed up with Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee, Nathaniel Rateliff) to create the album that reads like twelve rounds in a ring, summoning the will to fight the unknown rather than surrender to fear and fatigue.
Like literary icons James Baldwin and Maya Angelou, Burt acknowledges the limitless expanse of Black narrative. He is committed to the rich continuum of the tradition of Black expression claiming the space of artistic weirdness, often reserved for non-Black artists. Burt has a poet’s eye for detail, a surgeon’s sense of narrative precision and a folk singer’s natural knack for a timeless melody. You, Yeah, You is a cohesive body of work that clearly illustrates the ever expanding space in which Tré Burt’s voice belongs.
