As a part of our Under The Radar series unearthing independent artists who are doing great things, we turn our focus to BATTS
Folk rock project of Melbourne songstress Tanya Batt, BATTS has teleported us off our feet and onto our backs in a field of lonely stars with her new dreamy ballad ‘Dancing on the Moon’.
The track was recorded as a response to Philadelphia based musician of Gravey Train and This & That Tapes label owner Joseph Carlough’s similarly interstellar song ‘Liftoffs and Landings’, a narration of an astronaut's fears and worries as he leaves for space. BATTS, upon hearing the lyric “I miss my wife”, immediately picked up her guitar and got to work penning her reply in the role of said wife, thus chronicling a tale of a woman watching out the window each night in hopes to see her astronaut husband ‘Dancing on the Moon’.
If the story behind the lyrics isn’t enough to wet your eyes then the way BATTS presents it sure will. Free of embellishments ‘Dancing on the Moon’ is stripped to lone guitar chords, with BATTS soft, ethereal voice weaving throughout. Without a crescendo the echoey disembodied quality given to BATTS crooning is the very essence of the song - illustrating the immense loneliness and hopeful resignation of this fictional wife; though her husband is the one suspended in a zero gravity cosmic moor, thousands of kilometres away from another living being - she is the more isolated.
BATTS is no stranger to dabbling in the realms of space. Her debut album The Grand Tour was gestated as a concept album based around the events of NASA’s 1977 “Voyager” mission and she regularly intertwines samples of genuine interstellar recordings into her music. Though this time she writes from the perspective of the one left earthbound, BATTS talent for generous yet restrained songwriting and delicate, enveloping voice will likely have her reaching astronomical heights.
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