There's something inexplicably heartbreaking about Beth Orton's music. Is it the haunting melodies she writes? The wistful catch in her voice? The knowledge of the many travails this mere slip of a girl has weathered in her young life? It's difficult to pinpoint the precise source of the emotional authority in her music, but as with Van Morrison's great masterpiece, Astral Weeks, you know it's universal and that it goes very deep.
If you've been in love with Orton's work since her stunning debut of 1996, Trailer Park, the romance will ratchet up another notch when you hear her new record, Comfort Of Strangers, out on Astralwerks on February 7. It is absolutely beautiful. Produced by honorary Sonic Youth member Jim O'Rourke, the record finds Orton wrestling with the themes that have marked her music from the start; how life is simultaneously cosmically unfair yet beautiful; the redeeming power of love, which can nonetheless be brutally disappointing; and the persistence of faith and hope.
Also present and accounted for are the themes of loneliness and yearning, two states of being that have pervaded every song she's written. Obviously, it demands tremendous strength for Orton, or anyone, to reveal themselves to the degree that she does, and she's most definitely strong. She has a terrific sense of humor, however, neither of those sterling qualities change the fact that her life has not been easy. She lost both her parents while she was still a teenager, she's afflicted with a severe and chronic gastrointestinal disorder that makes it difficult to maintain an adequate body weight, and her romantic life is notoriously unstable. She's experienced paralyzing bouts of self-doubt, claims to have been a practicing alcoholic at the age of twelve, and spent a period in Thailand when she was in her early '20s toying with the idea of life as a Buddhist nun. "Home is where the heartbreak wraps cold around my bones," she says in "Safe In Your Arms," one of 14 tracks on the new album. Now 35, she's led a tumultuous life, yet she soldiers on transforming lead into gold.
The first single from the new record is a glorious piece called "Conceived" that embodies everything that's great about Orton. One of those heart-opening numbers that make your eyes fill with tears that you don't understand, it's one of Orton's faith and hope songs, and it may be the best one she's ever recorded. There's a whimsical touch of zither in the arrangement and a raw beauty in the way she sings this song that make it stick in the mind like a prayer. In the tradition of great British thrushes that includes Sandy Denny and Linda Thompson, Orton has the ability to infuse a lyric with a sense of timelessness and grace. Though there's something fragile and slightly wounded in the voices of all these women, they always sound as if they're singing for the ages. There's something very vast about the emotional landscape they evoke.
Orton's been faulted by some critics for making music that's excessively morose, but that criticism reminds me of a scene in Be Here To Love Me, a recently released (and wonderful) documentary about the late Townes Van Zandt. At one point an interviewer—a clueless one, if you want my opinion—asks Van Zandt why he writes such sad songs. Van Zandt falls silent for a moment then looks the reporter in the eye and says, "Don't you think life is sad?" For most of us, and for Orton, too, that's certainly the case some of the time; her particularly genius is her ability to transform that sadness into art.
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