Marva Delaine

Chicago, Illinois · b. 1987 · FARA Records

Marva Delaine (b. 1 May 1987) grew up in Chicago, Illinois in a church-and-choir household, but her real musical education came from her father's record collection — Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, everything cut in Memphis and Muscle Shoals in the years when a room full of real musicians and a Hammond organ could make a whole congregation out of a three-minute single. She married Isaac in her twenties, and the two of them have spent the years since learning, the hard way, that staying together and staying honest aren't automatically the same project. “What We Owe Each Other” is the first song they've written that says that plainly, together, rather than around each other.

Church choir and her father's Muscle Shoals and Memphis soul records, side by side, shaped her whole musical voice. She sings testimony-style — the plain, exposed delivery of someone saying something true in front of witnesses, whether the witnesses are a congregation or a marriage. Her influences run the Memphis and Muscle Shoals Southern soul tradition — Aretha Franklin's testimony-power, Otis Redding's grain and pleading — and Stax/Muscle Shoals Sound Studios' real-room, real-instrument analog warmth, adopted deliberately by a Chicago-raised artist rather than inherited directly from the scene.

On stage she's exposed by choice — she opens the song alone, over almost nothing, because the material demands it. Warm and plainspoken rather than theatrical; the power in her voice is earned through restraint held right up until it isn't. She and Isaac have been married since their twenties, and this is the first song they've written that addresses their own honesty directly rather than around it. Honest, weathered, tender.