Living the Dream Life: Best Fit meets Mary Epworth
Mary Epworth is on the brink of success. Her debut album Dream Life has received a countdown of categorical proportions. Not only has the Bishops Stortford local been caught on mainstream airwaves, her songs have found their way onto the Radio One playlist, and BBC 6 Music recently recorded a session with her. To top it all, she was invited to play their tenth anniversary party at Maida Vale, and has been confirmed on a bill that includes some of the world’s most legendary artists for this year’s Hop Farm Festival. With performances at Bristol Ladyfest and Bestival also in the pipeline, it’s nearly guaranteed that by the end of the summer, Mary Epworth will be a household name.
This new found success couldn’t have come soon enough for the singer-songwriter, who has been working hard on a career in music since she released her debut single ‘Saddle Song’ in 2007. Despite the landmark the song represents, “Saddle Song felt like it was from a different time and place I didn’t put it on the album,” Mary reminisces. “That was from a long time ago, and it was more ramshackle folk-y than the rest of the album ended up being.”
She goes on to explain the thought process behind those songs that have been included and in particular their running time. “We recorded about fifteen or sixteen tracks and once we’d done them we thought to ourselves, which of these make an album? We missed a few off and I’ve not done anything with them yet. There are some that came quite late in the process. ‘Those Nights’ wasn’t going to be on the album and we decided that it should be about sixth months after all the other tracks. We tried to find a body of work. The pace of them is important to me. There are a few ballads, but I didn’t want it to feel like the mood dropped too much.”
To date Mary’s material has seen the light of day on Hand of Glory, a small yet mighty label dedicated to her music. Dream Life won’t break that habit, “It’s still coming out on Hand of Glory but we’re distributing through someone else. Had we every copy would have come out through us. Now it’s going to be in shops, and it could be international too, in shops in Japan, which is really cool!”
Of the many musicians Mary has worked with over the years, synth and keyboard player Will Twynham is a constant. “We’re quite a stable band at the moment. At some of the sessions like Maida Vale we’ve had some more people with us, and Hop Farm some people can’t make it so we have a couple of girls coming to do a classic backing vocal session, a gospel-y thing. It’s all good really! We might have brass as well at some of them.”
“I was going to drop the Jubilee Band,” Mary continues, referring to the fact that Dream Life is out under her name alone, “But then I realised you can’t change your Facebook name! So it’s still Mary Epworth & The Jubilee Band, officially. Everyone who plays with me has their own projects, and their own bands, so it’s not that important to them that we identify as a band. We all enjoy it, but they’ve always got this other thing that’s their real passion.”
Mary’s ignorance at the potential heavyweight nature of her future is an endearing quality of her character. Every answer is infused with a sense of awe that she’s even made it this far. When questioned about the title Dream Life, she explains it indicates a goal that’s achievable, but still hard to reach:
“ the working title of Old Values for quite a time because I’ve been listening to New Values by Iggy Pop a lot,” she states. “That was joke code name for ages. Dream Life – it started as sort of a joke thing between Will and I, because we don’t make loads of money, so whenever there’s something we see that we’d really like, an amazing holiday or somewhere we really wanted to go, or live, we’ll fake and say it’s our dream life!”
But there’s also “three or four layers for me and means all of them, and it means different parts of them at different times. So I can think, yeah that’s a really tripped out part to the song so that’s dream life, but then I can remember what some of the songs are about, and it goes deeper.”
Thanks to the input of Matthew Robert Hughes, “a brilliant, brilliant artist”, the visual images of Dream Life are similarly multi-dynamic in their message.
“We wanted something that really had a mystery . Not necessarily a psychedelic or retro thing, what you feel when you’re looking at a landscape. It’s more of a layered universe rather than a psychedelic-off-my-face-on-something view! It’s more about that ‘other realm’ aspect. I think they’re amazing images; I was blown away when I saw them.”
“I know it will all be fine,” she laments over a recent designer flurry, “It’s one of those things where I know I should be getting more involved but it would be quite nice to switch off! We’re so busy, you can’t even think about what you’re doing. We’ve got so many gigs coming up, this weekend we have two, I don’t even know that I’m preparing. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind. It’s juggling, really.”
Dream Life is out now through Hand of Glory.
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