Mary Lattimore never seems to stop working; although two years have passed since her last solo album, Hundreds of Days, she’s put out two collaborative records with Mac McCaughan and featured on countless other albums, most recently Julianna Barwick’s Healing is a Miracle. Now she has announced a new solo record called Silver Ladders, which is coming out on October 9 – although this time she’s not fully solo, as she enlisted Neil Halstead of Slowdive. She tells the story:
“A friend introduced us because she knew how big of a fan I was and Neil and I had a little chat… The next day, I just thought maybe he’d be into producing my next record…. I flew on a little plane to Newquay in Cornwall where he lives with his lovely partner Ingrid and their baby. I didn’t know what his studio was like, he’d never recorded a harp, but somehow it really worked.”
The first song shared from Silver Ladders is called “Sometimes He’s In My Dreams”, which starts out in classic Lattimore fashion, her harp plucks glinting off an invisible surface, impossibly beautiful. But then, Halstead’s guitar comes in, instantly recognisable in its ascendant tone, and takes “Sometimes He’s In My Dreams” to a whole new plane of magnificence. On the song, Lattimore says:
“It’s a song borne from a long improvisation – it was a section we both liked out of a longer piece. After I finished playing, Neil shaped it and looped part of it and then added his dreamy guitar line. What started out as simple meandering solo harp with a ricocheting delay got a little deeper and more fully formed with Neil’s help. It’s probably my favorite part of the record because it’s nothing I would’ve thought to do, having made a lot of music on my own on the past. Plus, that guitar!”
Listen to “Sometimes He’s In My Dreams” on streaming platforms or via the YouTube below.
Mary Lattimore’s new album Silver Ladders comes out on October 9 through Ghostly International. Follow her on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Bandcamp.
