Softly, Tenderly, Using Delicate Voices: A Night with Mandolin Orange
by Amelia Johnson
Photos by Lauren Arzbaecher
“They found out about Union breaks,” Andrew Marlin jokes around the midpoint of the Tuesday night set in the Englert Theatre as Mandolin Orange quietly says goodbye to their multi-instrument band that had accompanied the past seven or eight songs and stands on the stage alone.
Two people – Andrew Marlin, holding a mandolin, and Emily Frantz, wearing a flowery long-sleeved dress with a guitar draped around her shoulders. A folk music duo formed out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
He gestures towards her. “This is how it started. We’ve been traveling around for 11 years.”
They lift their instruments and begin “Cavalry” from their 2013 album, This Side of Jordan.
During their hour and a half long set, Marlin and Frantz trade instruments often. He lifts his guitar from around his neck and hands it off to her, freeing up his hands to pick up his mandolin again. She hangs her fiddle from the mic stand in front of her and turns to their touring band to begin the next song. It happens with the ease of two people who have been in sync for a very long time, and you can feel that intimacy, that honesty in the music and in their lyrics.
“And I’ve stood where heroes have fallen their names turned to stone / yet I remain nameless, the best friend the hero has known.”
“A night with Mandolin Orange is a night of lyrical storytelling and instrumental virtuosity”
A night with Mandolin Orange is a night of lyrical storytelling and instrumental virtuosity. Fog lingers in the air, colored blue, red, and yellow by the stage lights, and a bright warm light hits the backs of the band, casting their shadows on the walls along the Englert balcony. Marlin croons lyrics like “softly, tenderly, using delicate voices / she’ll lean in close and draw me near” as Frantz sways to the music and floats towards the mic, violin in hand, to harmonize with him. They tell stories of grief, death, love, loneliness, and war over drums and acoustic guitar.
A show-stealer of an opening act, Kate Rhudy from Raleigh, North Carolina opened the night with stories for each of her songs – stories of asking a guy to kiss her underneath Fourth of July fireworks (and him saying no); of the cat she adopted that almost immediately ran away to hide on her neighbor’s porch; of getting drunk in college and kissing her friends. She comes out towards the end of Mandolin Orange’s show to lend her instrument to a fiddle tune called Hawk is a Mule, inspired – Marlin tells us – by a tour up the West Coast where all of them imagined that maybe the hawks they had seen in nature could smuggle their legal weed over the border to Canada.
“Hawk is a [drug] mule.”
They gather close to each other and begin the tune, stomping, playing with light in their eyes and smiles on their faces. Scattered clapping erupts in the audience and at certain intervals, the only lyrics “Hawk is a mule” burst from their lips. Light from the stage is yellow and warm, and the laughter is fresh off the tongues of the audience from the idea of drug-smuggling hawks.
And sheltered from the bitter cold, in the small, intimate space of the Englert Theatre, Mandolin Orange makes the audience feel. Feel laughter. Feel sadness. Feel beauty. Feel stories and something bigger than ourselves.