Marsy

A double-A-sided single that heralds the arrival of Marsy ~ ‘Chance the Dancer’ and ‘Let No Other Change Your Mind’.’ 

It’s hard to believe that songs as luminous as ‘Chance the Dancer’ and ‘Let No Other Change Your Mind’ didn’t start life in a sleek rehearsal space, or the belly of a shooting star, but instead in a childhood bedroom in Chipstead. A prolific songwriter since she was a teenager, Hannah Rodgers has always written “on my own in my room, just me and a guitar.” An exercise in catharsis and decompression, “I write from a place that’s hard to explain…it almost feels like a takeover, out-of-body.” 

Having written songs continuously in the way others may keep a diary, she found herself sitting on a stockpile. “I had this backlog of songs that I didn’t really know what to do with. I’d always wanted to be in a band but I didn’t really know how to make it happen.” Tentatively, she started sending the songs out to friends, road-testing them at small live shows, with different members “joining and leaving, coming and going”. When Rodgers hit upon the band’s current iteration, “it just sort of stuck.” Comprised of Hannah, Luke, Ruby and Paeris — their name a nod to an affectionate nickname for Rodgers’ late grandmother — Marsy’s members found a quick and total synergy. 

Together, they chipped Hannah’s home-demos out of the rock, layering new parts onto them gradually, “playing them round and round and round, making a bit more sense every time” until they glistened dazzlingly in the light. “This Marsy is the good spot, it’s where it always should’ve been,” Hannah continues. “I feel so lucky to be in a position where I’m playing with people who are so open and interested, who can feel the song out and find where it needs to go. There aren’t any walls up. The songs are delicate and raw, and as a band we embrace that, rather than just trying to get the most rock ‘n’ roll set together. It’s honest, sometimes it might be slow — but having a song that’s slow and spacious is a beautiful thing.”

Slow and spacious is an exposing landscape — but one that only makes Rodgers’ heart-on-a-plate candour and effortless songwriting knack all the plainer to see. In his Margate studio, producer Mike Lindsay [Tunng, LUMP] helped the band carve the air around the songs, “sculpting them out, giving them more shape”, as Ruby puts it.“It was very fluid and very collaborative; it didn’t feel like Mike was just pulling the faders.”

Described by Hannah as “a real ripping the plaster off” number, and by Luke as “an anthem for the sad”, the sublime, folkier-leaning ‘Let No Other Change Your Mind’ starts as a deceptively simple acoustic two-chord song, Hannah’s irresistible vocals front and centre as she sings Tearing pages / Out of books that I was reading / Cus you didn’t like / Lessons they were up to teaching / Used to take me / Too long to notice I was feeling nothing like me, full of vulnerability. Yet over the course of its four-and-a-half minutes, ‘Let No Other…’ builds to a fuzzy, cacophonous freedom full of harmonica, chimes, guitars and layered vocals — a transcendent unshackling emblematic of “writing about something damaging, and finding the good in it somehow anyway”, says Hannah.

In contrast to its companion track, ‘Chance the Dancer’ is bolder, poppier, and immediately hooky, its narrator shapeshifting between A ship-man going sailing / A siren calling out for love […]  A chancer who’ll call myself a dancer / Living in a song, riding a guitar-line that rolls like a breaking wave. The song is “about missed chances in life and love that on reflection were dodged bullets” Hannah notes, “and the resolution that can be found through the process of letting go”. Still there is disarming tenderness, which finds and shares all the beauty and identifies power in self-sufficiency, asserting It’s with myself I’m strong.

Though these two songs have distinctly different sounds, they are “two sides of the same coin” says Ruby — a perfect first peek into Marsy’s dynamic, boundless, captivating world. The coin is one that will keep turning in your mind, catching the sun; urging you to press play, just one more time.

Words: Diva  Harris.