Sam Morton - Daffodils & Dirt (2024) [Hi-Res]

SAM MORTON - the musical duo comprising of singer, songwriter and acclaimed BAFTA award winning actor and director Samantha Morton, and music producer and artist Richard Russell (Everything is Recorded) release debut album ‘Daffodils & Dirt’. Biographical brooding, poetic first statement of songs, couched in an unsettling, raw musical storytelling with Richard Russell production. Entering the musical space with collaborators; Jack Penate, Laura Groves, Alabaster DePlume and Ali Campbell (UB40). As collaborations go, you couldn’t ask for something more unforeseeable or more sublime, and it speaks not only to Morton’s bravery and the unerring quality of Russell’s instinct, but to their individual artistry, and to the creative sparks that fly between them when they’re together, something Pierre Guyotat once described as “the duel with beauty, which is the writing of a work.”

During her childhood, she rebounded from one children’s home to another, sometimes living with foster parents, sometimes sleeping rough, everything she owned in one small plastic bag. In Daffodils and Dirt, Morton does more than merely draw on her troubled past, at times seems to be back there, inside it – music as an out-of-body experience, music as possession. She might be using her natural singing voice, but it often feels as if she is actually inhabiting her teenage self. Somehow in the mystical act of singing, she has morphed into the girl she once was. Underpinning everything is Russell’s gift for emptiness and depth. Reared on 80s hip hop, he once claimed that the word ‘spartan’ guided his creative process. If the singer is a tightrope-walker, Russell is the air beneath, that yawning space that makes us realise how daring the act of tightrope-walking is, and how miraculous. Russell’s soundscapes, so thin and yet so rich, are the perfect setting for Morton’s delicate vocals and fierce feeling.