Marti West - Voices
Buy & stream Marti West's collection here: linktr.ee/martiwest

www.martiwest.com​

Mixed and mastered by James Yates at Majetone Industries

© ℗ all rights reserved

Voices

The album flows smoothly through life's stages, with the music subtly underscoring the emotional content of each phase. 

A journey through life's stages, exploring the bittersweet nature of growing up and aging, with music subtly evolving to reflect each phase while maintaining a cohesive sound.
Folk-rock base with elements that evolve to suggest different eras, maintaining core instrumentation and production style throughout.

First Light

Me and my cousin were just messing around and made this...Really proud of how it came out! 

Black 99 & DLVI - Green & Blue

Drummer Boy

Our best days can inspire excellence. 
https://www.ellingtonbooks.com/playlist

I am a healthcare executive completing a dual degree, Master of Public Health / Doctor of Health Sciences, focused on raising awareness about behavioral health, specifically among teens and college students. My dissertation research is focused on raising up the voice of college students beginning with communities of color. I am committed to helping people connect to their purpose in collaboration with mission-aligned leaders. Together we will achieve great things! I also provide leadership and career coaching to college students, recent college alumni, along with C-Suite executives.

Our project is a first step in raising awareness about a national health epidemic.
https://on.soundcloud.com/YGg4muhTLqh3m3vU7. All proceeds are reinvested directly into proactive strategies for improving behavioral health among youth, teens, and young adults in collaboration with community partners.

Here's exactly what your music streams support. We sponsor every day people of all ages struggling with behavioral health challenges that are commited to making a sincere change in their life towards their purpose. We match then with mentors for the long term. Learn more, https://www.voiceuplife.life/together.

Our youth, teens, and young adults are reporting the highest levels of loneliness on record according to the U.S. Surgeon General. Our work is going to help change that through simple actions that bring people together for the common good, focused on lifting people up, and creating stronger in person connections.


Build Me (Save Me)

On January 17, 1712, after a furious and partisan Parliamentary debate, the British Secretary of War in a whig ministry (Robert Walpole) was committed to the Tower and expelled from the House of Commons. In a pre-democratic/post-democratic mirror reverse image of our own time, Britain’s future Prime Minister was imprisoned for corruption even though he wasn’t found guilty whereas the incumbent President of the United States (in Walpole’s time a British colony) hasn’t been imprisoned even though he was.

“The Ballad of Sir Robert Walpole” was originally written to mark the bicentenary of Walpole’s return to Parliament in 1714 and published in “Doin’ Different”, a collection of new folk ballads about  Norfolk notables the following year. Walpole was larger than life in every way, seeming to belong naturally to the Hogarth cartoons in which his era is preserved and extravagantly embodied in Houghton Hall, Norfolk, the immense and palatial neoclassical stately home – a “Neptune and Britannia Rampant Counting House as Castle” - he built in the West Norfolk woods. We have tried to convey something of Walpole’s formidable largeness of life and Hogarthian cartoon spirit, the latter most especially in the choruses (which in the film the feminine side of our duo sings live to a bucolic audience of horned cattle in the January grounds of Houghton Hall.) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpYbaw4g3X4


Knight of the slightly drooping Garter,
King of Bankrupt Hall,
Lord of the Backstairs Tower Tryst,
Stout Adam of the Fall.

Richeldis, Julian, Sawtrey, Nelson,
Boleyn and Boudicca tall,
Margery, Fanny, Turnip, Kett,
Old Tom Paine and all-

Norfolk and good our heroes stand
With something pure about ’em
But none more Norfolk nor more good
Than Dodgy Bob of Houghton.

Sir Robert Walpole, King of Sink,
The Pharaoh of the Flaw,
The not so bumpkin nor so dumplin’
Loophole in the Law.

The first Prime Minister and still
Unequalled in that office;
The backwoods front-man, laughing loud,
The Prince of Peace – and Profits.

The Age he named is hero-free,
No children need to know.
They keep it off the syllabus,
No killers boldly go.

No Bonnie Charlie anthems, saints,
No bagpipe calls to arms;
Just German Georges 1 and 2,
Enlightenment and farms.

The beau, the rake, the dandy, fop,
The mistress-paying knights,
The hypocrite with itchy palm:
‘All thesemen have their price.’

Sir Robert Walpole, Count of Cash,
The Pharaoh of the Flaw,
The not so bumpkin country speakin’
Loophole in the Law.

His Babel built ‘too far from London’ 
Under a Norfolk bushel
The Neptune and Britannia Rampant
Counting House as Castle.

His bust and Caesar hairdo placed
A British cut above
The classic Mantle he assumed
Of Wisdom, Justice, Love.

Removed the timber duty while
He ordered his supplies,
Avoided Finished Buildings tax
With one unfinished frieze.

Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Ease,
The Pharaoh of the Flaw,
The ruddy cunnin’ Norfolk rulin’
Loophole in the Law.

Our burly boisterous backhand Bob
Was bawdy in his cups
Had heart-to-hearts with kings and queens
Yet kept the common touch.

And when the South Sea Bubble burst
And drowned both Whig and Tory,
He saved the country with a speech
And rode the tide to glory

Avoided War for eighteen years
Of Profit weighed with cost,
‘They ring the bells, they’ll wring their hands,’
He said when Peace was lost.

Sir Robert Loophole, Laughin’ Bob,
The Prophet of the Flaw,
Three hundredweight of Killed Cock Robin
Loophole in the Law.

Warwick Jones composed the tune and plays it.

Peacock's Tale (Gaz n Maz) do the rest. From our double album of new Norfolk/East Anglian folk ballads  "Done Different" https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/done-different-2

The Ballad Of Sir Robert Walpole

​ @PeacocksTaleFolkIndieDuo  for all our music videos. Watch this one here - https://youtu.be/yXIy0qNWFDc

One evening fair to take the air
Down by Blackwater side
It was gazing all, all around me
Towards the Irish lad I spied

All through the first part of that night
Well, we lie in sport and play
Then this young man, he arose and gathered his clothes
He said, "Fare thee well today"

Well, that's not the promise that you gave to me
When first you lay on my bed
You could make me believe with your lying tongue
That the sun rose in the west

Then go home, go home to your father's garden
You go home and weep your fill
And you think of your own misfortune
That you brought with your wanton will

For there's not a girl in this whole world wide
As easily led as me
Sure, it's fishes will fly and the seas run dry
Tis then I'll marry thee.


Trad/arr Peacock's Tale. The beguiling tune is Irish as is the young man. The River Blackwater in Essex is the probable scene of the story and the words are an old English folk lyric telling the same old folk tale of a young woman beguiled, though in homage to Mary Wollstonecraft and of modelling a more modern female we adjust it slightly so that she sees through him before the end. We got it in one take and in one lump (apart from the brief hand drum on the instrumental) as I'm playing a foot drum with each foot under my bass while Maz is doing her usual multi task thing. Nice and simple.

Blackwaterside

fire and the box - stripped-

We adapted this from Linda Ronstadt's version.


Adieu false heart, since we must part
May the joys of the world go with you
I've loved you long with a faithful heart
But I never anymore can believe you

I've seen the time I'd have married you
And been your constant lover
But now I'll gladly give you up
For one whose heart is truer

My mind is like the constant sun
From the east to the west it ranges:
Yours is like unto the moon
It's every month, a changin'

When I lay down to take my rest
No scornful morn to wake me
I'll go straight ways unto my grave
Just as fast as time can take me

Adieu false heart, since we must part
May the joy of the world go with you
I've loved you long with a faithful heart
But I never anymore can believe you


from Four Points of Departure, track released May 20, 2023
https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/four-points-of-departure 
Song composed  by Arthur Smith.

https://youtu.be/oLOnH1YPgg8 for film on location in Florence

Adieu False Heart

The More Grace He Gives

feels so right

A marriage (and we are actually married, 45 years so far) of melody and rhythm. We do folk, indie, Americana, Norfolk noir, beat poems &  ghazals. Traditional tunes with contemporary beats. Music videos  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb8wV0-DNiFs1R5G2VSytBQ
Maz lead & harmony vocals, acoustic guitar. Gaz vocals, voice, bass, drums & percussion, harmonium, recorders, lyre harp, field recordings.

Adieu False Heart

Peacock's Tale Musical Storytelling

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