

“Amplified Heart,” released in 1994, included the original version of “Missing.” Then Terry’s club-ready remix with a new, danceable beat, carried Everything but the Girl to a worldwide audience the single went gold in the United States and platinum in Britain. Both ‘Amplified Heart’ and ‘Walking Wounded’ - it’s there in the titles of those albums, you know? - they’re very much songs about us both feeling isolated by the experience, but also learning to live with each other again.” “And Tracey had to witness that change, which was very difficult in its own way. “There was a period in the ’90s where we had to learn what it was like to live with each other again, mostly because of the aftermath of my illness, which left me a very changed person,” Watt said. I always like the idea that people can step into our audio picture, you know, and almost walk around in the reverbs.”Ī life-threatening health crisis for Watt in 1992 - he has a rare autoimmune disorder, Churg-Strauss syndrome - led Everything but the Girl to pare away verbal and musical frills to reveal rawer feelings on “Amplified Heart” and “Walking Wounded,” the albums that would mark its artistic peak in the 1990s.

The space that you leave allows room for the listener. “That’s true both in the choice of notes we use and in the lyrics that we write. “Ambivalence and mixed feelings is a big through line in all our stuff as well,” he said. Complexity and simplicity is very key to it.” There’s something of that going on in these records.
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You know, if you were a film director, your vision, or the ideas that you keep, might be identifiable whether you make a western or a detective movie or a romance. “We’re exploring things with a different costume on. “I can see the through line,” Thorn said.

Through every change of style, Thorn’s voice - low, smoky and pensive, rarely indulging in vibrato or ornamentation - gave the duo’s songs an emotional equipoise. Its songs used subtlety as a stealth tactic, with smooth, richly tuneful music concealing lyrics that challenged political and psychological assumptions.

With each album, Everything but the Girl took a different approach: from skeletal to maximal, bossa nova to rock, retro Wall of Sound to sleek Los Angeles pop. Todd Terry, became an international smash. “For God’s sake, if we had known we were going to carry on for years we would have come up with a better name,” Thorn wrote in “Bedsit Disco Queen.”įor its first decade, the group maintained a solid midlevel recording career - until 1995, when a remix of “Missing,” by the American D.J. By then it was clear that their music had aged to sound classic, not dated.Įverything but the Girl got its name, with post-punk cheekiness, from the sexist tagline of a local furniture-store advertisement that showed a model next to the goods on sale. In the 2010s, Thorn and Watt oversaw expanded reissues of the group’s catalog that found an eager audience. It was almost like an escape valve from everything else.”īut they hadn’t entirely put Everything but the Girl behind them. “And I think we decided we would carry on working on our own solo paths for a while. “We probably made a conscious decision at some point that if we want the kids to stay sane, we want the family to stay together, you know, something’s got to give,” he said. Working independently, with projects appearing at different times, allowed them to “tag-team” bringing up their family, Watt explained. After some years devoting herself to their toddlers, Thorn got back to songwriting, releasing four solo albums she also wrote books, including the wryly revealing career memoir, “Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star,” and “Naked at the Albert Hall,” her reflections on the physicality and mentality of being a singer. founded a label, Buzzin’ Fly and made solo albums and toured as a singer-songwriter, which he’d been planning to do in 2020 when the pandemic shut things down. Watt produced albums traveled the world as a D.J. During the intervening decades, Thorn and Watt maintained separate, prolific careers.
