Odetta Hartman returns next month with ‘Swansongs’, her first album since 2018s ‘Old Rockhounds Never Die’.
So far she’s released three singles, each collecting a dizzying array of genres together into one cohesive whole. Among the genres she lists herself are “cowboy soul” and “future folk”. The deftness with which she pulls everything together is both incredibly impressive and endlessly satisfying.
The latest single is ‘Winter Constellations’, which she says was “the first to track, last to crack”. She explains, “The early demos of this song were always built around a banjo accompaniment but the lack of quality home studio resources left the chordal content feeling limp and metallic”.
Co-producer Alex Friedman’s “bag of tricks”, which included “Crayola-coloured boom whackers and a homemade xylophone with slate and glass panes” brought “so much life and whimsy to the arrangement”, that it required “a warmer layer of support than my cheap-o-banjo could offer”.
Luckily, co-producer Wyatt Bertz “had fallen deep into the rabbit hole of synth magic, and with a mad-scientist’s grin, suggested we ‘feed the DNA’ to his Moog, then scroll through our options”.
“This breakthrough moment was an ultimate game-changer for the record, and frankly, my personal musicianship: by converting the banjo audio to midi, we were able to twiddle knobs til we found the most perfectly warm digital texture while keeping my finger-picked gestures and individual impulses intact”.
She concludes, “The solution arose from being absolutely stumped and subsequently inspired many revisions on the record - an excellent reminder of why we love the craft”.
You can catch Hartman live in the UK and Ireland supporting Mutual Benefit next month, including a show at St Matthias Church in London on 20 Mar. She’ll also perform in-store at Rough Trade West on 22 Mar.
🎧 Listen to ‘Winter Constellations’ below.
