New York avant folkers Tam Lin have been mixing traditional musical styles with more modern studio-driven techniques to great effect for close to a decade now. And on their upcoming fifth album, Medicine For A Ghost, the band evokes timeless sentiment through a combination of tried-and-true musical structures and a sense of boundless technical ability. Weaving lush soundscapes with rows of orchestral strings and gliding acoustic guitars, Tam Lin architect Paul Weinfield creates vast tableaus of pastoral beauty and shimmering pop incandescence. Nowhere is this more evident than on Tam Lin’s latest single, “Flame Within The Sun,” a slowly unfurling pop gem that runs a softly chiming introduction through waves of striking guitars and cathartic vocals and exhibits a nervous pop aesthetic which makes the song seem as though it’s ready to burst outward at the slightest touch.
Weinfield elaborates on the origins of “Flame Within The Sun”: “I wrote this song back in 2008. It came out of a dream I had, and also out of my life and heart at that time. I was wondering then about how people make love last. How does one changing person keep another changing person in his heart for all eternity? I had this idea that maybe the little flames of all our loves are like the little fires that burn inside our great and giant sun.”
And speaking of that dream, Weinfield says, “Then there was the dream. I had just visited a friend of mine who does Tarot readings. She pulled the Seven of Wands for me and told me that it represented a struggle to make something important last in spite of great odds. I could see a love of nearly a decade in the card. That night, I dreamed I was back in Morocco, where I used to live, and I saw a wedding in the street in which seven grooms carried sheaves of wheat — just like in the Tarot card! And I dreamed that my beloved was old and with me there. So when I woke up, I had the story for the song.”
Beats Per Minute is pleased to premiere the latest single, “Flame Within The Sun,” from Tam Lin’s upcoming album, Medicine For A Ghost.
