Marlo Mudd is a songwriter based in Washington who recently released their debut full-length album, Songs From My Youth. Recorded at Anacortes Unknown Studio during the pandemic, Mudd says the album looks “at times passed in a changing world and from the retrospective gaze that comes with getting older.”
Songs From My Youth sees Marlo Mudd combine elements of folk and indie rock, resulting in something that sounds both wistful and empowering. She’s also joined by a long list of friends and collaborators who add everything from drums and bass to violin and saxophone. Songs like opener ‘The Moon and The Sun’ and ‘When The Plums Are Ripe’ are delicate folk songs, built on a skeleton of fingerpicked guitar and Mudd’s soft vocals, and ‘Where O Where’ strips things back further to a Mountain Man-style acapella.
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But songs such as ‘Ronin’s Song’ are rich and full-bodied, rounded off with deep percussion and a propulsive energy. This interplay between fragile emotion and forward motion is present across the record, combining not only moods and tones but a sense of time too. The traditional sensibilities of ‘Like The Rain’ juxtaposed with a more contemporary indie rock/bedroom style seen on tracks like ‘Bella Bella’.
One of the record’s standouts is ‘Wife’, another of the tracks which dials up the dynamism and combines both threads of the Marlo Mudd sound. The song is “about not wanting my identity to be wrapped up in whether or not I’m single/married,” Mudd explains, and the fluid nature of the sound takes on this playful subversion, its brightness evading any attempt to nail it down in such binary thinking.
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Songs From My Youth is out now and available from the Marlo Mudd Bandcamp page.
