DELICATE STEVE | Delicate Steve Sings album cover artwork
DELICATE STEVE
I’LL BE THERE new single
out 11.06.24
(ANTI-) video 
DELICATE STEVE | I’ll Be There video
included on
DELICATE STEVE SINGS
new album
out 16.08.24 pre-save/add Steve Marion is the critically acclaimed – and 100% instrumental – songwriter and guitarist better known as Delicate Steve. He has today announced that his new album, ‘Delicate Steve Sings’, will be issued on 16th August on ANTI-, with a first single and video from it for the song ‘I’ll Be There’ out today. Marion states that ‘I’ll Be There’ was inspired by the singing style of Bill Withers. “His music is so sincere it’s almost impossible to believe it when you first hear it,” he explains. “I came up with what the guitar is playing while thinking of his song ‘Lean On Me’. Once I felt embarrassed enough about what I was playing, I knew that’s what it had to be.” Warm and evocative, with an arrangement full of subtle supporting flourishes, the strings of collaborator Renata Zeiguer add an understated grandeur to a track that brilliantly captures the emotive capacity of Marion’s guitar work. The track will be a no-brainer for setting the mood on a drive up the coast or at a late-night soiree, as well as introducing his new record in suitable style. ‘I’ll Be There’ is accompanied by a video directed by Joe Cappa, who adds that “to me the song evokes endless love, and since I had recently acquired some Super 8 film I thought ‘why not make a trendy wedding video with it?’ Steve and I gathered up some friends, headed to Palm Springs and shot it over a weekend. Everyone was a trooper on set, enduring a super cold and windy shoot in Joshua Tree and lugging around awkwardly crafted puppet women.” 
DELICATE STEVE | 2024 photo by Eleanor Petry
As for his new album, is its title a reference to the ‘voice’ of Marion’s guitar? Does he actually sing this time? Has he not been singing all along? This is the crux of ‘…Sings’, given that Marion is a rare example of a musician with a body of work behind him that is immediately recognisable. In a world of indie-rock landfill stuffed with guitars and amps, nobody else sounds like Delicate Steve. Marion’s unique style has kept him busy in an array of settings. The sheer spread of his work outside his own catalogue – collaborating with Miley Cyrus and Paul Simon, playing in Amen Dunes and the Black Keys, being sampled by Kanye – doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a chameleon. It just means he’s singular. One night while on a trip to Greece, Marion looked out over the sea as he was listening to Willie Nelson’s pop standards record ‘Stardust’, a cosmic epiphany washing over him about what his next record could be. ‘Delicate Steve Sings’ is a record centred on channeling iconic voices with his guitar and, in doing so, casting himself in the role of iconic singers who are able to make standards their own. In the process, he reveals just how singular (dare we say iconic) that voice is.
The guitar sings these songs – smoothly, sweetly, boldly, and on its own terms. Much of ‘Delicate Steve Sings’ was recorded with Jonathan Rado on bass, Kosta Galanopolous on drums, Renata Zeiguer providing strings and co-writer Elliot Bergman. You can hear this team of exceptional musicians approach the album with the same smooth reverence you’d hear on something like ‘Standards’, yet there is a requisite subversiveness to what Marion is doing here. Although it does include some cover versions, this is not an album full of them. DELICATE STEVE – REVIEWS
“Indie music’s most unpredictable and under-rated guitarist”
GUITAR WORLD
“Steve Marion has become something you didn’t know you even needed in this day and age: a guitar hero…his luminous leads form the emotional undercurrent around which everything else flows”
PITCHFORK
“Delicate Steve slyly eludes generalisations. There’s no telling when a track will take an abrupt, peculiar tangent”
NEW YORK TIMES DELICATE STEVE SINGS
TRACKLISTING
1 Cherry
2 Baby
3 I’ll Be There
4 Easy For You
5 Yesterday
6 Medieval Eyes
7 Wind Won’t Blow
8 Stay With Me
9 Walkin’
10 These Arms Of Mine 
DELICATE STEVE | 2024 photo by Sheva Kavai
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