Beth Orton: Weather Alive

Orton’s writing, too, has grown more elusive. She has spoken in interviews about her diagnosis with temporal lobe epilepsy, a condition she is reluctant to describe in much detail beyond its resulting seizures and memory problems. The lyrics on Weather Alive, which occur in bursts and fragments, often circle around these types of disembodying experiences. “I have lived as a satellite,” she sings. “I saddled up/I settled up/I don’t sit right.” Other songs seem designed to capture and prolong brief portraits of serenity, a practice that might feel counterintuitive to someone more prone to meditating on darkness. “Almost makes me want to cry,” she sings repeatedly in the title track. “The weather’s so beautiful outside.”

The lyrics set a scene, but the landscapes tend to form gradually with each element of the production: washes of synths and wordless backing vocals, bursts of electric guitars and flickering percussion, slow drone of a saxophone. When she drifts from the narrative in “Weather Alive” to explore meaning beyond words—“Something like, something like, something like,” she sings around the five-minute mark, as if instructing her bandmates to follow her lead—you start to consider each song as an improvisation: a conversation that could drift into tears or laughter, personal revelation or total silence, depending on the mood.

This nebulous approach has always been central to Orton’s music, which defied categorization from the beginning. In a 1999 interview, she seems exhausted and uncomfortable trying to pinpoint her genre: “Maybe I’m sort of folk-soul-blues-jazz…,” she says, letting her voice trail off into a series of comic, unintelligible syllables. When the interviewer starts asking about specific influences, she changes the subject immediately, noting she just saw Madchester group the Happy Mondays play the other night and they were pretty good. They also seemed a bit tired, she added, acknowledging it was near the end of a long tour for them.

It’s the type of observation a fellow musician is uniquely qualified to make, but it’s also one that Orton seems to focus on, with something resembling obsession, more than two decades later. Listening to Weather Alive, you get the sense that each song is inextricable from the time it was made, the emotions surrounding it, the room where it was written, the view outside the window, the initial response from each collaborator. The atmosphere of a particular song, the quality that allows it to fill a space, she suggests, is dependent on each of these factors. The most upbeat song on the record is called “Fractals,” and its lyrics are uncharacteristically elaborate, as Orton wraps her head around the span of a lifetime and our ever-evolving perspective on love and dreams and hope. “In the hand of the unknown,” she sings, “I made an art out of believing in magic.” Weather Alive is a testament to her conviction, an eerily physical experience with the power to make believers of the rest of us.

Beth Orton: Weather Alive

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