Jodie Jean Marston
Talent, Oregon, United States | Established. Jan 01, 1986 | SELF
Music
Press
"Redtail", the second album from Jodie-Jean Marston, is a gorgeous slab of dusted southwestern twang pop that finds the songstress further honing her considerable talents in a song cycle of love, loss and rural redemption. Since her modestly assured debut, "Mountain is a Mountain" for the Secret Eye label, Marston has relocated to the Southwest and forged a partnership with Ned Oldham (as in Will's brother; the main man in Anomoanon) and also signed to Oldham's Box Tree Records.
"Redtail" was recorded in Baltimore by Ned Oldham and in Dixon, NM by Marston, where she now hangs her hat most of the time. These songs are folky, almost country pop, lent a faint glimmer from the hazy desert environs that likely influenced their creation. The production is no frills, but still ever so baked, with lazy arrangements that slowly spread out across the listening space and linger for a while. Palace Brothers is a reference point, and Ned's Anomoanon. I also can't help but think of the Renderers (who Will Oldham has covered and toured with); they exhibit a similar rustic desolation, but throw on a lot more distortion.
Marston's resonant vocal is given considerable weight by Oldham and the rest of her band?s backing harmonies. There's even a very well placed effect to offer a further sense of delirium. On tracks like the opener "Hands of the Prairie", opened up with a spooky wandering blues lead, "Wilderness" and the deeply moving "Porchlights", Marston reaches the most divine heights of introspective Americana and manages to brush up against few other genres in the process. These are songs about the living on the prairie, in the margins, and other subjects close to Marston's heart. The results are timeless and contemporary in the same breath. 8/10 -- Lee Jackson - Lee Jackson
Discography
Jodie Jean Marston, 'Mountain is a Mountain', Secret Eye in 2002 in Tuolumne, CA and Providence, RI
Jodie Jean Marston, 'Redtail', Box Tree Records in 2004 in Baltimore, MD and Dixon, NM
Jodie Jean Marston, 'Wildflower', recorded at Nowhere in 2011 by Phil Elverum in Anacortes, WA (upcoming release in 2020).
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Bio
Cosmic cowgirl and singer-songwriter, Jodie Jean Marston has performed music for 30 years, since she was a little girl. Growing up in the Sierra Nevadas of California in a small logging town of Tuolumne City she got her start performing music beginning in 1986 at fiddle and banjo contests, lumber jubilees and local events. During high school she formed her own band reaching out further playing radio shows and other events in Stockton and Sacramento. Jodie Jean grew up raising horses and cattle and was involved in 4-H and Future Farmers of America, she twice won the National FFA talent competition for the state of California. She was awarded California State scholarship for the arts for performing folk music as well. She has busked in Northern Europe, played the streets and coffee shops, colleges, art collectives, house shows, bars up and down the West Coast, and some big-city venues opening up for Bonnie Prince Billy (Will Oldham) on the East Coast. She learned to play drums and was a singing drummer in an avant-garde band all over the deep South, then back to playing solo originals while raising two kids in the desert Southwest. During this time she published two projects: Mountain is a Mountain (Secret Eye) and Redtail (Box Tree Records). For the past six years in southern Oregon, she has been singing out in an all-female bluegrass/old-time band, Wild and Blue. Her last project, Wildflower was recorded by indie icon Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie and the Microphones. Jodie Jean recently performed in Lake Como, Italy at the Rockefeller Bellagio Center.
Her sound includes tinges of folk, bluegrass, Americana, and old-time. The songs are rustic and windblown, sweet (but not too sweet) with the well-worn honesty of distant places and rural peoples. She is married to author Robert Arellano lives in Southern Oregon with her family, raising sheep and making music.
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