According to her SoundCloud, singer-songwriter, Margaux Bouchegnies plays "acoustic guitar, electric guitar, electric bass, upright bass, piano, keyboards, bottlecap, handbells, glockenspiel, and mellotron" on her new EP.
She also, of course, wrote and sang on all the songs. Other instruments featured on the recordings include tambourines, trumpet, trombone, banjo, and pedal steel guitar.
The product, "More Brilliant is the Hand that Throws the Coin," is as intricate as you might expect from an album that winds so many different sounds together. Perhaps even more miraculously, despite the richness of the arrangements and the often poetic and nuanced lyrics, the songs feel remarkably simple, brewed from evenings spent journaling by candlelight, sifting through memories as the snowfalls.
Despite its cohesive veneer, the album, which was produced by Sahil Ansari (Slow Dakota, JW Francis), is often about internal chaos and the pesky tempestuousness of the heart. The closer you listen, the more its depth, texture, and contradictions reveal themselves. This contrast—between simplicity and complexity, and between restraint and wild release—is a central theme on the EP, which is ultimately a reflection on the universal yet unavoidably complex matter that is growing up.
The song "Cave In" is about "feeling stuck inside someone's perception of me as a younger version of myself and the seemingly futile effort to change their view," the 20-year-old Seattle native said. Similarly, "Hot Faced" was written when she was "feeling angry about how conditioned I've been as a young woman to act so submissive and small," a message that will resonate with any woman who's felt trapped within a shell of submissiveness. "Hot faced / lamb woman, Too quiet / to be noticed," she sings. Later on, she says, "I wanna see myself malfunctioning I wanna see myself skip in place." Desperate to show her true colors, yet held back by the world around her, she switches between tempos and tone colors, and between the way others see her and who she wants to be.
At last, the seams break open on "Palm," allowing the fullness that's been hinted at in previous songs to surge outwards. Though it starts as a more upbeat tune, "Palm" soon collapses into a moody guitar riff that swells into a whirlwind of strings, billowing synths, and expressive drums. The song's lyrics are about holding back for fear of being too much, but eventually, she gives in to her true emotions and finds her power, and what follows is a dazzling and dreamlike outro.
The final track, "Smaller Home," a perfect road trip song, is about returning briefly to a place you no longer live and realizing that though you've changed, the place has stayed the same. "I'm moving every day," she finally concludes. "Can't stay an age." It's a wise message about the bittersweet inevitability of change.
There's a theory—popularized in Clarissa Pinkola Estes's seminal novel Women Who Run With the Wolves but dating back to time immemorial—that within each woman lives countless archetypes, from an ancient, wizened crone to a young child. To fully access her personhood, a woman needs to be in contact with all these forces, but too often, women suppress parts of themselves, particularly their "wildish" nature, that uncontrollable life force that lives latent within.
Margaux writes from the perspective of someone who has begun this journey and is working to expand past others' perceptions of her while integrating the past and future into a discernible union. It's a testament to her musicianship that she's able to spin childlike nostalgia, primordial wisdom, and so many instruments into such a light, effortless harmony.
Follow Margaux on Instagram and Twitter, and listen on Spotify and Soundcloud: