Thea Gilmore releases new single "You're The Radio" out August 23rd
Album 'Murphy's Heart' released September 6th
Thea Gilmore will release a new album, 'Murphy's Heart', on September 6, 2010. This will be preceded by the self-fulfilling new single, "You're On The Radio", on August 23rd.
Following sell-out shows through last year - including a rapturously-received December date at Bush Hall - Gilmore will also announce details of an extensive UK tour.
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Not for no reason does Bruce Springsteen buy her records (other fans include the likes of Joan Baez and Martha Wainwright). For seemingly anyone that has heard of Gilmore has fallen for her, and whilst she is not (yet) a household name, Thea's is a genuine word-of-mouth success story, which shows no signs of slowing down.
Watch "You're The Radio" video:
Having turned down all the major labels at least once, Thea Gilmore has been making intensely personal, socially aware music since she was a teenager. She can even get away with releasing a rapturously-received, alternative Christmas record (last year's 'Strange Communion', which featured a Yoko Ono cover, a duet with Mark Radcliffe, and a musical invocation to a pagan sun god - hardly 'Rocking Robin' territory).
Its follow-up is Thea's tenth studio album: a big deal in itself, but one which also falls on the year of her thirtieth birthday. "If it's a milestone at all," she says, "it's because I feel my guard has dropped a bit. There's been a bit of a glass wall in front of what I do. If that's not all gone, then it's only clingfilm now."
So 'Murphy's Heart' is smart, honest and confident enough to concentrate on life's most important themes. Parenthood - Gilmore takes her three and a half year old son on tour with her - crops up on the likes of "Mexico" and "Wondrous Thing".
Sex, too, slinks into view, and if the song "Teach Me To Be Bad" had a subtitle, it might well be, Teach Me To Do Bad Things.
"I'm from a small village in rural Oxfordshire, where there were only two boys." Gilmore says. "So I'm still learning!"
Away from the summery singalong of first single "You're On The Radio" - "I wanted a bright, breezy, happy person for a few minutes" - there are altogether darker musical shades.
"How The Love Gets In" is a piano-led piece that considers the "glimpses" we get of love and happiness, while "Automatic Blue" deals with a friend of Gilmore's who met the love of his life some years after getting married and having children to someone else.
"My father did the same thing for years and years and years," explains Thea, "so I know what the fallout feels like. But my friend, who the song is based on, was very dignified. He completely backed off, and watching someone so in love with the person they couldn't have made me very, very sad."
Ten albums in, and 'Murphy’s Heart' offers the clearest insight into Gilmore's own.
She takes the stuff of domestic everyday life and makes it beautiful, and has received both the critical acclaim and the loyal following to sustain a decade of criminally-unheard music (the first time she got on the radio, she was already on album three). There is now this sense of a tipping point being reached, and you'd be hard pressed to deny that she's earned it.
"Unarguably one of the finest singer-songwriters of her generation" - Sunday Times Culture
"The best British singer-songwriter of the last ten years - and then some" - Uncut
"Breathtaking...unadorned expressions of pain, vulnerability, and, ultimately, hope" - Guardian
"The best wordsmith of her generation" - Independent
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