Elanor Moss – The Way That It Feels
London-based songwriter Elanor Moss releases the new single/video, “The Way That it Feels” from her debut album, The Knife, The Needle, out August 21st on Merge Records, and announces new U.S. tour dates this fall.
Following the lead single “Sarah Waiting in the Car,” “a delicate folk song with gentle orchestration” (Brooklyn Vegan) that “recalls Vashti Bunyan in places, while the songwriting continually asserts its individuality” (Clash), “The Way That it Feels” is sung over birdsong and Moss’ classical guitar, capturing an entire universe created in the bond between two people: “Oh and the way that it feels // To know you // Oh and the way it reveals // I don’t know you.”
The couplets mirror each other and hang, like a veil, over the rest of the song. Regardless of time, intimacy, love, tenderness, and the way those things can change a person and a relationship, there is, she asserts, an immutable fact to these things: that whatever she learns from them, there will always be something unknowable just beyond.
Moss reflects, “This was the last song written for the album, and feels to me like it sums up the spirit of the record. The more I learn about love the less I know, the more I know about someone, the more I know I don’t know them. It feels like an appropriate last song for an album about paradoxes; love asks us to hold contradiction without giving in to its discomfort. A song about not turning away, but turning towards.”
The accompanying video is the second in a series made with award-winning filmmaker Matthew Thorne in the Greek Peloponnese, shot on 16mm film with DOP Tasos Chatzis.
Across the nine songs that make up The Knife, The Needle, Elanor Moss renders joy and pain in exquisite peals of psych-folk, her darkly-dreamed vignettes offering, if not catharsis, an understanding of the complexity of the journey towards it — healing as a process, rather than an object one obtains.
The Knife, The Needle concerns itself with the way relationships between people are transformed, complicated, and troubled by love. It’s devastating work, a feat of tight lyrical construction that is at once patient and vulnerable, opulently rendered and keenly felt. Remarkably, The Knife, The Needle emerged from a place of restraint, with Moss — staying in a cabin near her parent’s house in the Scottish highlands after initially recording an entirely different version of the album in New York City (“a bit rollocking,” she notes) — feeling the pangs of the album she hadn’t recorded — “quieter, weirder, more English.”
Rerecording with a new ensemble and producer/engineer Pete Miles was a risk, but setting aside an already completed project was worth it. In the quieter, weirder, more English sound manifested here, Moss captures something fleeting, ephemeral, and honest about the moments in which love, for good or ill, irrevocably changes someone. Both the knife and the needle named in the album’s title are capable of drawing blood, but illuminated by her voice and guitar, what bleeds out from these songs is nothing short of poetry.
Elanor Moss Tour Dates:
Tue. Aug. 11 – Santa Barbara, CA @ SOhO*
Wed. Aug. 12 – Santa Cruz, CA @ Kuumbwa Jazz Center*
Thu. Aug. 13 – Sonoma, CA @ Sebastiani Theatre*
Fri. Aug. 21 – London, UK @ Rough Trade Denmark St (In-store)
Sat. Aug. 22 – Oxford, UK @ Truck (In-store)
Tue. Aug. 25 – Canterbury, UK @ Vinylstore Jr (In-store)
Sat. Aug. 29 – Little Mongeham, UK @ Smugglers Festival
Thu. Oct. 1 – Glasgow, UK @ The Poetry Club
Fri. Oct. 2 – Leeds, UK @ The Attic
Sat. Oct. 3 – Manchester, UK @ Low Four Studio
Sun. Oct. 4 – Stroud, UK @ The Prince Albert
Tue. Oct. 6 – Birmingham, UK @ Hare & Hounds
Wed. Oct. 7 – Bristol, UK @ The Jam Jar
Thu. Oct. 8 – Cardiff, UK @ Chapter Arts Centre
Fri. Oct. 9 – Oxford, UK @ Common Ground
Sat. Oct. 10 – Ashburton, UK @ Field System
Sun. Oct. 11 – Brighton, UK @ The Folklore Rooms
Mon. Oct. 19 – New York, NY @ Nightclub 101
Wed. Oct. 21 – Washington, DC @ Pie Shop
Fri. Oct. 23 – Harrisonburg, VA @ Sage Bird
Sat. Oct. 24 – Durham, NC @ The Pinhook
Sun. Oct. 25 – Richmond, VA @ Spacebomb Studio
Tue. Oct. 27 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Mr Small’s Funhouse
Thu. Oct. 29 – Detroit, MI @ Moondog Cafe
Sun. Nov. 1 – Chicago, IL @ Tack Room
Wed. Nov. 4 – Bloomington, IN @ The Bishop
Fri. Nov. 13 – Seattle, WA @ Ballard Homestead
Sat. Nov. 14 – Portland, OR @ Turn Turn Turn
Mon. Nov. 16 – San Francisco, CA @ 4 Star Theater
Tue. Nov. 17 – Los Angeles, CA @ Moroccan Lounge
Thu. Dec. 3 – London, UK @ Cecil Sharp House
* supporting Angelo de Augustine
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