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Valentine’s Day might be over for another year, but love is still very much in the air here at Holler. We can’t get enough of the stuff. So, while Kelsea Ballerini might be making us all feel a little bit moony right now, Ellie Turner is lifting us right back up again with ‘The 'I Love You' Song’ and its magical stop motion animated video.
Taken from her upcoming album When the Trouble’s All Done - which was produced by Jack Schneider - ‘The 'I Love You' Song’ blends the whimsical indie pop of Isobel Campbell and The Softies with the folk-Americana of artists like Esther Rose and Erin Rae, coming out the other side as a mixture that's best described as twee-country.
It sounds almost subversively naïve; refreshingly raw and honest at a time where everything else in the world is edited down, cleaned up and smoothed off until there’s nothing left of life in it.
“I wrote this song a few weeks into the initial pandemic shutdown,” Ellie Turner told us. “Life wasn’t too dissimilar to that of a strange fever dream at that point. Every day I would wake up, eat breakfast, put on my tennis shoes and just start walking for hours at a time… After weeks of this, I remember hitting a breaking point of sorts. I was simply tired of being sad and I was bound and determined to write a happy love song if it was the last thing I did on this earth.”
“So, I set out walking as I always did and line by line, this kitschy little tune fell out. I remember smiling the whole time as I walked. And months later, in the studio, when we were getting ready to play this song, I remember Jack looking at me and saying, ‘Remember to smile when you sing!’”
The video for ‘The 'I Love You' Song’ was directed by Mertcan Mertbilek, who has previously worked his magic on Sara Watkins’ video for ‘Pure Imagination’. It’s premiering exclusively on Holler below.
Originally from Dallas, Texas, Turner discovered old-time music through a fiddle jam during her time at University in Arkansas and quickly became enamoured. After several years in the corporate world, she found the courage to quit her job and move to Nashville to pursue music.
Turner’s first full-length album, When The Trouble’s All Done, uses stripped-down production and a commitment to capturing a singular performance to deliver unique moments, seemingly divorced from day-to-day life.
The resulting record falls somewhere between the anti-folk of Kimya Dawson and Holler favourite Jude Brothers. As Turner explains to us, this “imperfection” was entirely intentional.
“The album was performed and recorded live-to-tape at Sound Emporium Studios in Nashville,” she says. “This was a very conscious decision made by myself and my producer, Jack Schneider. We would play the song live until we felt like the most honest version of the song had been performed and captured. The imperfections and unexpected little moments of each performance are where the magic of the record lives. I wanted it to feel as if I was in someone’s living room and was handed a guitar to play.”
When The Trouble’s All Done is released on March 24th on Muhly Grass Records.
