Beth Orton

For Beth Orton, growing up as an artist was never going to be seamless.

The early version of Orton became something of a cultural touchstone. Her music soundtracked dawns and comedowns, fragility and tenderness, arriving at a moment when a generation, many for the first time, were learning how to feel. "My music was there for people as the sun came up and they came down," Orton muses. "I was the soundtrack to a vulnerability that belonged to a particular time." She understands how seductive it can be for an artist to want to remain preserved there. "I was the comedown queen," Orton says. "And I was meant to stay forever held in that time."

But staying was never an option. "For one thing I couldn't be that girl and bring up children, to love them as they need to be loved," she says. "For another, I couldn't stay as I was and stay alive. The changes I had to make to live consciously transformed me." Growing up meant carrying one foot in an earlier self, out of loyalty to the people who loved her then, while continuing forward anyway, accepting the bumps, the losses, and the shedding of skins and ways of being that no longer served her. That process would eventually become unavoidable - not just emotionally, but physically.

For more than 30 years, Beth Orton has been our antenna to the cosmos, the poet laureate of forces too vast to take in all at once. Her records arrive patiently, unified by emotional focus rather than any single musical style. From the pioneering folktronica of 1996's Trailer Park to the earthy classic-rock miniatures of 2006's Comfort of Strangers through 2022's self-produced Weather Alive, she has built a catalog that exists proudly out of time, each album its own planet in an ever-expanding solar system.