Billie Marten’s parents did not pretend to like Dog Eared, her fifth album but the first where she begins to tease out the trails and trials of adulthood. They were only two tracks in when a bit of dissonance brushed awkwardly against their ears, 1 minute and 50 seconds into “Crown”—“The minute you are gone/I lose where I belong,” Marten sings, holding that final forlorn note as the band bends slightly away in a sly bit of text painting. They called their daughter and admitted they didn’t really get it. How had the soft-voiced singer who had become a British teenage star gotten here, singing about addictions and neuroses above notes that didn’t seem to make sense? Sure, Marten was disappointed. But there was certainly some degree of delight, too, because it was suddenly clear she’d accomplished what she hoped to do with Dog Eared all along. She had slipped the stereotype of her past and, at last, made more than a merely pretty record.
The first time Marten and producer Phil Weinrobe spoke by phone, sometime in the summer of 2023 as she drove aimlessly through the Yorkshire Dales, they realized they shared a vision for what her next record wouldn’t be: another singer-songwriter album. That is, they didn’t want to recruit a band of beyond-capable aces only to ask them to stay out of the way, to support the songs rather than express themselves. Marten had spent the first decade of her career making music that put her in that silo, and, as she neared her mid-20s, the claustrophobia only intensified. Patient and restrained, full of the space for which she yearned, Dog Eared is her entirely successful first step beyond it and into a record where songs become places for players to interact with Marten, where they tease out in real time what they are trying to say together. Marten’s singing has never been more nuanced or versatile than it is here, her songwriting never more rich or poignant. But on Dog Eared, she is simply and happily the band member who happens to write and sing, surrounded by an elite crew responding as she goes.
In July 2024, Marten flew to New York to try an entirely new way of working. In the year since their first talk, Weinrobe methodically built a band he felt would fit Marten’s demos. Vishal Nayak and Joshua Crumbly became the elastic rhythm section, supplying muted soul and subtle momentum. Weinrobe gathered a little fleet of guitarists—Michael Haldeman, Sam Evian, Adam Brisbin—and recruited keyboardist and pianist Michael Coleman, too. He also arranged for guests to drop in: singer and guitarist Núria Graham (whose 2023 LP, Cyclamen, had become a touchstone), superstar percussionist Mauro Refosco, Sam Amidon with his fiddle, Shahzad Ismaily with whatever spoke most to him in the moment.
Everyone heard the same edict anew: They had not sequestered themselves in Weinrobe’s Sugar Mountain studio during a steamy Brooklyn summer to make a singer-songwriter record. Play to and in the moment, he said, with each other. They would all perform together live, capturing human takes and not overdubbed perfection. Marten would mostly sing, another compelling instrument in a sterling ensemble. Her songs, Weinrobe reckoned, were strong enough to take care of themselves.
He was right. These 10 tunes remain perfect snapshots of Marten’s Gemini mind (in spite, mind you, of her astrological reluctance), as she both reconnects with the childhood that predates her early career and turns toward her own self-made future. Hanging on her every word and vocal turn, the band around her enhances and deepens them. Hear, for instance, the way the group first kicks up little clouds of dust during opener “Feeling,” then eases back beneath her, like a pillow meant to lift Marten. It is a song about the tenuousness of our existence, about how the divide between our most sacred memories (for her, her father’s large hands or playing on her grandmother’s rugs) and a permanent void is beyond razor-thin. “We are oh so lightly here/Softer than a rabbit ear,” she sings, the band pulling back again as if struck by her epiphany about how little we can actually know. They are, however, almost effervescent during “Clover,” an oxymoron-laden drifter about trying to parse left from right, up from down, reality versus delusion. Every time it arrives, the refrain—“I’m way above the atmosphere/I stare at cracks, and they disappear”—feels like a sunrise or a flower unfurling, any hard-won moment of briefly getting life right.
Where closer “Swing” is a wondrously ragged country-folk anthem about anticipating oblivion that suggests Big Thief sitting in with The Breeders, “Planets” is a brilliant pop paean to the possibilities of the future. Here is the promise of growing “grey and old” with someone else as the rest of the world spins toward chaos, rendered with the thoughtful care of Leslie Feist and Françoise Hardy.
The irrepressible “Leap Year” lingers in the space between those two, suspended forever among past, present, and future. Written on Leap Day in 2024 while Marten wrestled with winter malaise in bed, her first non-autobiographical song considers a couple who can only rendezvous every four years, on our astronomical makeup day. They long for the future but cling to the moments they have. After she rewrote the second verse in Sugar Mountain’s stairwell, the band played the revamped song for the first time while Marten sang. That take is the centerpiece of Dog Eared, with Sam Evian’s epochal guitar solo perfectly framing a couple trying to feel their way forward while knowing they are destined to fail.
Marten loves to leave her mark on a good book—underlining important passages, scribbling ideas in the margins, folding the corners of pages into dog ears to mark her place. The 10 songs of Dog Eared serve that purpose, telling the story of who she was as she wrote and recorded it, cleaving her adolescence from her adulthood in order to move forward. She is the songwriter who finds wisdom in horses and encourages self-reflection while realizing she has barely begun her own. She is the singer who makes the chorus of “Goodnight Moon” as beautiful as a lunar corona and smartly lets dissonance slip between her voice and the band around her as she watches something she loves disappear during “Crown.” (Her parents, mind you, have come around. Dog Eared’s charms are, ultimately, that undeniable.) Marten is a consummate singer-songwriter who has dared to push beyond the limitations of that form and make a stunning record that marks a new page, suggesting what comes next through the strength and beauty of what’s right here.
