Mandolin Orange: The Letting Go

As if grief weren’t already the most devastating of emotions, it has a cruel way of compounding itself by fracturing other relationships, sometimes leaving us stranded on islands of loneliness as we struggle to cope with our sorrow, much less communicate it.

Those schisms can weigh as heavily as the heartbreak that permeates every note of “Golden Embers,” the sad and beautiful opening song on Mandolin Orange’s new album, Tides Of A Teardrop. As depicted in a semi-autobiographical video, the song reflects on loss and how it wounds. And how talking about our anguish can help us heal.

Apparently, writing songs about it also helps, as Mandolin Orange singer/mandolinist/acoustic guitarist Andrew Marlin discovered while penning tunes for this album, the sixth he and singer/fiddler/acoustic guitarist Emily Frantz have released together since meeting at a bluegrass jam session in 2009.

 “It’s a very healing process for me to work through some of these thoughts and to put them to music,” Marlin says. “The important part of songwriting, to me, is that it is just such a therapeutic and calming part of my life.”

He wasn’t actually aware that he needed that therapy until he realized he was pouring out years of unresolved grief from losing his mother when he was 18.

“I think I was holding onto the pain as though that was my link to my mom, and I realize now that it was hindering the memory and putting a damper on my relationships with other people in my family who were also missing her,” he explains, as he and Frantz speak via phone from their home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “I’m trying to let go of the pain and let go of the anger that comes along with that, so I can look back on more positive memories and start [re]building those relationships.”

Listening to the pair’s music has a cathartic effect as well. These songs unfold gently, slowly, and as Frantz wraps delicate ribbons of harmony and fiddle around Marlin’s unhurried vocals and mandolin flurries, they create an intimate, almost impressionistic mood. It’s calming and soothing, even when the lyrics express loss and sorrow.

Though Mandolin Orange’s last album, 2016’s Blindfaller, entered Billboard’s bluegrass chart at No. 3 and their moniker — hastily chosen for their first gigs back when Marlin still played a kit-made orange loaner — celebrates one of the genre’s key instruments, that label hardly defines the duo’s sound. Augmented by Clint Mullican on bass, Josh Oliver on electric and acoustic guitar and piano and Joe Westerlund on drums and percussion, it owes perhaps even more to folk, with suggestions of blues, jazz and of course, country (and western, in the twang and understated clippity-clop rhythm of “Lonely All the Time”).

Only one song on Tides Of A Teardrop really evokes traditional bluegrass: “Suspended In Heaven.” Marlin, who wrote it one Mother’s Day, sounds as if he grew up in the Appalachian enclave of Hiltons, Virginia, tucked right into the Carter Family Fold, as he laments, “Mother is gone, her journey’s unending/ We’ll see her pass by in the night sky a’glowing/ And she’ll see the blue of the oceans rising/ The tides of a teardrop, suspended in heaven.”

He actually did grow up nearby, just over the North Carolina side of the border. The three generations of female pianists in his family leaned toward gospel and hymns, but at 14, when he first picked up a guitar, he was listening to Led Zeppelin, the Beatles and Pantera.

“Then I found bluegrass and folk music and a light bulb clicked on in my head,” he recalls. “That was the music and the sounds and the tones that I’d been missing.”

He’d already moved to Chapel Hill when he started playing mandolin, at 20. “I love the tones and just where it fits in the role of a string band,” he says, “and it just made sense to me and was really appealing.”

He credits Frantz with helping to broaden his horizons in the realm of acoustic string music.

 “She’s always conscious of the melody and always incorporates that into her solos. I love that about her playing, and I think that was something that she brought out of me — and is still trying to bring out of me,” he says with a laugh. “But that really helped me when I was first starting to learn the mandolin.”

Frantz, who grew up in Chapel Hill, was already steeped in bluegrass when they met. Bored with classical violin training, she shifted to bluegrass fiddle lessons in adolescence. (As for the difference between violin and fiddle, she cites a favorite laugh-line: “I’ve always heard that you can’t spill beer on a violin.”)

As she demonstrates on “Into The Sun” and “Like You Used To,” Frantz sings lead quite beautifully. She just prefers to sing harmonies. “It’s what I like doing and what I feel like I’m better at,” she explains. “When Andrew and I met and started playing together, it lent itself really well to playing with someone who’s a songwriter and a strong lead vocalist.”

She also leaves the writing to him, though she’ll give feedback if he wants it. “But as far as arranging the tunes and trying to figure out how we want to record them and how to play them live,” she says, “I definitely weigh in on that stuff.”

On this album, their easy collaboration turns into dynamic interplay with the band, recorded live at Echo Mountain Recording in Asheville, North Carolina.

“Blindfaller felt a little more like an experiment in the studio, because we were just jumping right in with the band and making a record,” Frantz says. “This time, we had played together for two years leading up to it, which I think just made the process of fleshing the tunes out a little more …”

“Natural-feeling,” Marlin offers.

That comfort level lends a mellow, relaxed vibe to these songs, almost regardless of their subject matter — which, it should be noted, isn’t always immediately evident. Marlin is such a deft lyricist, he turns a deer’s perspective, for example (in “Mother Deer”), into a story that could be as direct as it sounds, or could be another metaphor for his own loss.

Letting go of the pain from that loss became more important with the arrival of Ruby, who was only 2½ weeks old when her parents conducted their first interview following her arrival. Cooing quietly in the background, she already sounded ready to commence life as a road baby.

“She was born very close to the date that my mom passed away,” Marlin reveals. “Usually, this time of year is a very difficult one for me, and brings back a lot of feelings and memories. And now, there’s many, many more positive associations with this time.”

And by pouring the ache of loss into Tides Of A Teardrop, he and Frantz created another one: an album that turns sorrow into a sweet-sounding lullaby, ready to serenade a new life.