They got me with this one. Everything But The Girl, the long-running UK duo of married couple Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt, recently started releasing new music and playing live again after a decades-long break, and the first single from their upcoming album Blue Reservoir is all about aging and missing the version of yourself that did ridiculous, passionate, self-destructive things all the time. In a soft and husky rasp, Thorn sings, "Yes I’m older and wiser/ I know more than I did then/ But I’d give up all the wisdom to be young and dumb again." Whoof. That's too real. I'm not sure I was ready to confront that level of realness on a Wednesday morning in October.
Everything But The Girl started way back in 1982, and they went through a number of different styles, from the slinky sophisti-pop of their early days to the slinky drum 'n' bass that they adapted in the late '90s. (The sounds were different, but the slinkiness remained.) EBTG went inactive after 1999's Temperamental — great album — so that Thorn and Watt could focus on their solo careers. In 2023, they returned with the comeback album Fuse, which found them playing around with dance textures once again. Last year, they returned to performing live after a quarter century, playing a series of sold-out shows at the MOTH Club, a small London venue. Today, they announce Blue Reservoir, a new album directly inspired by their MOTH Club experience.
In a press release, Tracey Thorn talks about how much the duo enjoyed the experience of those MOTH Club shows: "There was an intensity and simplicity to the MOTH shows that took us back to how we started out. Direct, rooted in guitar and voice, a few extra colors. We hadn’t been in that world for a long time, and it just felt fresh and real."
In response, Ben Watt bought a Spanish nylon-string guitar, and the duo went back to writing the kind of lush, thoughtful songs that they made when they were starting out. Watt says, "It is the sound of so much of the music I first connected with growing up, and I’d never actually owned one. It became quite an emotional springboard for me. I found a voice I thought I’d lost."
"Young And Dumb," for instance, is a soft acoustic song with a lilting bossa nova rhythm. It's one of the songs that Everything But The Girl wrote earlier this year, drawing on Latin music and English folk. They recorded most of the album live at London's RAK Studios, with a band that included double bassist Rex Horan, drummer Evan Jenkins, and percussionist Fabio de Oliveira, those father Bosco was a big influence on Everything But The Girl's 1984 debut Eden. Thorn and Watt's son Blake Watt, now of the London indie-folk band Family Stereo, guests on two songs, and Ben Watt overdubbed in some extra stuff at home later.
Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt wrote the treatment for the "Young And Dumb" video, and Edward Bishop directed it, shooting it at the MOTH Club. It's a single-shot performance with a few surprises, and it really lets you focus on the song, which got under my skin immediately. Thorn and Watt are both in their sixties, and I find the song to be a beautiful way of reckoning with the passage of time. Check it out below.
TRACKLIST:
01 "Forward"
02 "Scala"
03 "Young And Dumb"
04 "Do What You Can"
05 "Christmas Gone"
06 "Courage Mon Brave"
07 "The Round And Round"
08 "Fork In The Road"
09 "Good Hope"
10 "The Great Unknown"
Blue Reservoir is out 2/19 on Buzzin' Fly/Virgin. Pre-order it here.
