EBTG's Tracy Thorn's new album

New Yorker

Pop Music
Everything but the Tour
Tracey Thorn turns semi-pro.
by Sasha Frere-Jones

May 17, 2010
The widely reported demise of the music business isn’t necessarily going to be bad for music. The forty-seven-year-old British singer Tracey Thorn, who has removed herself from a race she once ran—and ran well—has added a fantastic album, “Love and Its Opposite,” to her solo catalogue. Both the album’s themes and how it was made suggest a model that may become increasingly popular: the semi-professional musician. Making music as a pastime has appealed to talents as diverse as the modernist composer Charles Ives and the post-punk engineer and guitarist Steve Albini. If hits are to be had by only the very few, perhaps more musicians will feel free to stop worrying about making them.

Thorn will not tour for “Love and Its Opposite,” and she didn’t tour for “Out of the Woods” (2007), her second solo release. (Her first was a 1982 EP called “A Distant Shore.”) With the collapse of album sales, touring is one of the few dependable sources of income for artists; Thorn’s decision not to do it suggests that she is taking a hobbyist’s approach. “I just want to make it and then get back to my other life,” she told me.

Thorn is best known as the singer of Everything But the Girl, a duo she has maintained with her husband, Ben Watt, since 1982. Though the couple is still together, the band hasn’t released an album since 1999, which she attributes largely to the demands of raising three children in London.

Read the full review HERE.