Maple Bee - Little Victories (2015)

Fourth Solo album by multi-instrumentalist Melanie Garside. Features single To All The Lost. UK dates being announced for the summer. Folk radio will be featuring the first single through June / July. It has been a long, strange trip for Maple Bee. Born Melanie Garside, she found early fame of sorts with indie noiseniks Tabitha Zu and her sister Katie 'Daisy Chainsaw' Garside's QueenAdreena, as well as Our Lady Of Miracles and Vertigo Angels. She then spent time touring and writing with female classical acappella troupe Mediaeval Baebes, before forming the electro-pop duo Huski. Mel's solo work as alter ego Maple Bee has effectively formed the musical backdrop to these other creative endeavours, providing her with the chance to express and mould her self-penned, self-produced and self-recorded material in a way that is hers alone. Her four albums - 2004's double Chasing Eva, 2008's Home, These Four Worlds in 2012 and now the brand new album Little Victories - have been a form of therapy for her, a series of diary entries that have helped her examine or exorcise the events of her life. Two decades of creative endeavour have passed since Mel enrolled at college in Nottingham and met the musicians with whom she would form her first band, Tabitha Zu, later known simply as Zu. Immediately acclaimed, much of the attention was focused on force of nature Mel and by mid-decade she had signed to Echo as a solo artist and was being touted as the Next Big Thing. However, despite excellent reviews for her debut album, Fossil (produced by Julian Mendelsohn), internal record company politics resulted in distribution problems and the record was quickly forgotten. Under pressure to be the perfect pop star, it was with some relief that she fell in with a more alternative rock crowd when she joined Our Lady Of Miracles, who later became Vertigo Angels, followed by her stints in Queen Adreena and Mediaeval Baebes and then co-founding Huski. There have been times when it seemed as though the fragility of it all was too much. If not for her music and writing, many of the emotional struggles that Mel has endured may never have been resolved.