Beth Orton: She Cries Your Name

There's something about East Anglia - the long, straight roads; the pounds of decrepit lorries beside them - that recalls what US liberals mustn't call the flyover states. So it's not such a surprise to learn that Beth Orton grew up in Norfolk.

As Pitchfork said in 2009:

The disconnect between how Beth Orton was pitched to us and the way her music actually sounded was as vast as the barren landscape she fetishized. Instead of a lonesome troubadour traversing the desolate American West from carpark to carpark, Orton was a Norwich-born theatre chick who found herself in the midst of a rapidly-changing mid-90s UK pop scene.

A version of She Cries Your Name appeared on a first LP (released in Japan only), and this one appeared on her first UK album Trailer Park.

Pitchfork said of it:

Even more than a decade later, "She Cries Your Name" still sounds great, with [William] Orbit's luxuriously gloomy string arrangement-- especially the way the cello's low-end signals the entrance of the chorus like stage curtains parting-- and the deft production hands of UK electronic scenester Andrew Weatherall and Bad Seeds' Victor Van Vugt providing the perfect context for Orton's cozy, impressionistic Americana sketches.

It's now 25 years later and the song still appeals.