My Album of The Month : THEA GILMORE : Can You Hear The Ghosts Sing

 

So my signed copy of Thea’s fine FINE album arrived

It is totally fab and something of a revelation in that I don’t think I was expecting the band to be so good and tight, she with her guitar and singing is enough for me but heck these guys are TIGHT!

Beautiful production and played daily so far

Now I am guess it is sold out now and was a limited edition but if you check her social media there’ll be loads out there for you to enjoy

Thea on YouTube

Taster HIT: 

This Girl is Taking Bets - TURN IT RIGHT UP

This is TUESDAY’s Song of The Day

Yet Another Advert Break and PURCHASE of THE DAY! THEA GILMORE : Can You Hear The Ghosts Sing?

 Thea is a local gal and nothing wrong with that say her live in Oxford town and hey she was fab!

I was 7 months pregnant… somebody pressed record… BUY THE LIMITED EDITION LIVE ALBUM Twenty years ago I climbed onto a bus 7 months pregnant with my first kid and went on tour. Every night, at roughly 9pm, the bump would obligingly shift sideways so I could get a guitar over it. He kept doing it for weeks after the tour had ended. A professional from the very beginning..  It was 2006. Harpo’s Ghost had just come out and I was touring with a band, carrying an increasingly enormous future human around with me, singing these songs night after night. And, wonderfully, somebody recorded us. So… CAN YOU HEAR THE GHOSTS SING? (VOL. 2) is here. The second instalment in my little series of live recordings rescued from various corners of the past. Listening back to this one was like finding an old box of photographs.. some you cringe at a bit and occasionally you see a face you’d rather not, but it’s a wonderful time capsule. The songs are younger. I’m younger. You can hear the band breathing and stretching around the music, audiences in the room, mistakes, sparks, all the lovely untidy bits that disappear when you try to make music perfect. A little ghost of who I was then, caught on tape. There are only 1,000 physical copies of this one. Every CD is hand numbered and signed by me. I gave my amazing Patreons first dibs last week and they’ve already bagged more than HALF of them. ❤️ I actually had to delay telling everybody else because I was sitting here, one woman surrounded by CDs, envelopes and labels, wondering what the hell I’d done. 😂 But I’ve caught up now, mostly! So the doors are officially OPEN. AND while one version of me is busy packing up songs from twenty years ago, the current version has her head buried in something completely new. The next Echo Line song is coming before the end of August and I cannot WAIT for you to hear it. It is huge and different and talks to a large chunk of messages that came through in the last round. There is more Echo Line news coming too. Quite a lot more, actually… but that’s for another time. Old songs coming back to life… New songs being born from strangers on a telephone line. Twenty years between them. Same person in the middle, still trying to make sense of being human by making songs about it. I love this precarious life. Can You Hear The Ghosts Sing? Vol. 2 is available NOW. Once the physical copies are gone, they’re gone. Come and find a ghost… Love always Thea xx BUY NOW! BUY TICKETS

THEA GILMORE - Call Me Darling (album version 2017)

PLAYLIST: THEA GILMORE - Shrewsbury Folk Festival, Turtle Doves Stage UK 2022 : Big O

 BUMP . . . .just because

Thea Gilmore is on the decks and worth another visit if only for a cover of Miley Cyrus’ ‘Wrecking Ball’ (yes seriously!)  This extraordinary ethereal voice born just up the road from here . . . . . I saw her play locally and have been haunted by that voice ever since. If you ever heard anyone say that someone is an old soul this is what they mean. This is the muse herself singing to you . . . . . . . . Sam Beckett once said of the staggering Billie Whitelaw that her’s was the female voice he heard in his head. Well this is true for me of Ms Gilmore. 

BUMP: Thea Gilmore - Live at Shrewsbury Folk Festival 2022

Thea Gilmore on the Turtle Doves stage at Shrewsbury Folk Festival 2022.

RISE - and she did . . . . . . . 

 (from Big O - yes really, great posts from Singapore if you can stand the comments section with the trolls and racist filth)

Someone questioned my statement on the earlier post about her standpoint around the time of Afterlight and her situation and it is all still very much available and in the public domain otherwise I would normally not disclose but felt that Thea’s message here was important especially about abusive relationships and coercive control :

Afterlight is a real account of one woman’s journey from impressionable 16-year-old bound into a toxic working and romantic relationship with a man 23 years her senior, to a brand new artist and free woman finding her own beginning.

It's 25-years since Thea Gilmore embarked on a career in music.

For 23 of them, she made records that are treasured by loyal fans and mark her out as a singer-songwriter of searing talent.

But something wasn't right? behind the public image of the fearless singer songwriter, she was living a life contained.

Although she has an incredible 18 albums to her name it's only now that she has freed herself of that control that she has been able to complete a different kind of debut ? not so much a new artist as an artist renewed.

She says: "Now is a time to draw lines.

Now is a time for an end and a beginning.

There will be two releases.

The last Thea Gilmore album and the first Afterlight album.

Welcome back to the start?." Two records, released together, that share the same subject matter but stylistically are worlds apart.

Self-titled Afterlight was made in 2020; its companion piece The Emancipation of Eva Grey was imagined 100 years ago, at the height of the Jazz Age, with two tracks that feature on the soundtrack to the new film adaptation of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit (2020) starring Dan Stevens, Isla Fisher and Judi Dench.

For the first time since she was 16-years-old Thea Gilmore has been able to create music on her own terms, free to make her own choices, liberated from other people's fears and no longer hiding from her own in the name of her art.

At long last, she has been able to completely immerse herself in making her music exactly as she wants to.

And what music it is ? enough for two lifetimes.

The songs sprang from the end of Thea's 23-year relationship with her producer/husband, a collaboration mired in coercive control, mistreatment and infidelity that left her "hollowed out, mostly air, a lacework of a person held together by bones and the threads of a story." Gilmore goes onto say that "One of the things I have always loved and hated in equal measure about being a writer, is the capacity to hide and call it art?I am good at it ? creating a small beauty and blurring your vision just a little so you can't see the picture too clearly.

"It was my own sort of control I suppose.

There was a safety in it and it stopped anyone looking in too far.

I gave them a perfect picture of the headstrong, feisty artist because that was who I wanted to be.

"I won't aggrandise what happened to me (or perhaps reduce victims of far more extreme behaviour) by calling it abuse, but it took 23 years of my life.

It is a bereavement.

Time and self-lost at the hands of someone else.

It is theft.

"It seemed appropriate that the last album I make as Thea Gilmore amplifies the voice of someone else while the first Afterlight album is transparent and brutal and only me.

"There is always a story though.

We are all built from stories, it's how we make sense of the world.

As for my story, it's early days.

I am still mostly air, but for the first time in my life, I'm learning how to write myself back in".