100 Greatest Songs of the 20’s So Far #80 Beth Orton – Lonely

Released: 2022

In the wake of the release of her 2022 album Weather Alive Beth Orton wryly quipped “I’ve been famous”. The tense was important in the sense that both of her late 90’s comedown classics Trailer Park and Central Reservation won Mercury nominations and if not stardom, in the celebrity sense, a knowledge that there would be a place for her art.

That career period came to an end after being dropped – charmingly, by phone – from her label in the wake of the pandemic. Juggling motherhood and managing Chron’s disease, redemption came in the discovery of an umpteenth-hand piano, on which much of her post major debut Weather Alive was written.

The chastened circumstances were a seed bed for one of the year’s finest releases. Doused in regret but rarely bitter, it’s centrepice was Lonely, a song about the contradictory forces which pull modern womanhood from one dingy unfulfilled expectation to another. That piano is prominent of course, but it’s the orphaned sax, and that voice in it’s ragged, wrung out, heart stabbing glory, which proved what she knew all along, that some accountant somewhere had royally fucked things up.