Tracey Thorn – “Let Me In” (Stereogum Premiere)

Tracey Thorn – “Let Me In” (Stereogum Premiere)

The Falling is the debut feature film by director Carol Morley. It’s about a fainting epidemic in an all girls school in the 1960s, but really it’s about friendship, growing up, femininity, and control. Watch a trailer for it here if you’re not familiar. The movie premiered last fall in England at the BFI London Film Festival and is slated for official release on 4/27. While the film itself looks like a beautiful, poignant thing, this is one of those cases where the soundtrack not only contributes to the movie’s overall feel but assumes a weight of its own.

The music for the movie was done completely by Tracey Thorn. The soundtrack is a brief, 17-minute EP called Songs From The Falling. But within these eight songs, I hear echoes of the uncertainty and timid discovery that dogged and brightened my own girlhood. Thorn wrote and recorded all of the songs in her London home studio, engineered by former Everything But The Girl collaborator Ben Watt.. Morley sent Thorn a box of school instruments used in one of the school scenes from the film, and Thorn confined herself to these — wood-block, tambourine, triangle, recorder — along with piano and guitar.

Previously, Thorn shared the mesmerizing “Follow Me Down,” a song that urges exploration amid Thorn’s beckoning vocals and these other strangely adolescent noisemakers. Today we’re premiering “Let Me In,” another vividly personal song that feels like it was directly pulled from the psyche of a teenage girl. Perhaps that’s why this soundtrack is so moving, it was written by a grown woman who still has the depth of memory to capture what these moments felt like and give them voice with the wisdom she has now. Listen below.

Songs From The Falling is out 4/27 via Strange Feeling. Pre-order it here. For more on Tracey Thorn, read our 2012 interview with her.

more from News