Mara Simpson shares the delicate yet deliberate folk of "Ghosts"
Hailing from Brighton, “Ghosts” sees Mara Simpson pair her rich, distinctive vocal with a seemingly effortless knack for folk songwriting.
The track is structurally simple, but rich in its relative sparsity; somehow invoking a pastoral setting with its delicate opening, which is then built upon with percussion, vocal harmonies, and deliberate strokes of cello. Simpson’s influences come from a veritable melting pot of acoustic genres, but the result is anything but erratic, producing a perfectly balanced blend of folk, blues, and Americana.
"Ghosts was written about the streets of Schillerkiez, a neighbourhood in Berlin that boarders the old Tempelhof airfield, now turned recreation park,” Simpson explains of the track. “The former aircraft hangars have hosted the worlds leading fashion designers, stars of pop music and one of Germany’s biggest refugee camps. Schillerkiez used to be full of drug addicts, marooned on the edge of a disused no-mans land. I moved into Okerstrasse against the advice of German friends. The drug addicts are still there but now the young and beautiful from across the world weave around them in their playground that is now one of the trendiest parts of town, seemingly oblivious [to] all those ghosts in the streets."
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