When I was little, my mum used to sing Joni Mitchell's "Circle Game" to me and my siblings when we were settling down to sleep. We used to call it the "dragonfly song" because of its lyric about a boy catching a dragonfly inside a jar, which seemed the height of adventure to me at the time. The song's stayed with me, and I listen to it at times when I want to feel comforted and close to her.
There's a similarly endearing quality to the music of London-based singer/songwriter Laura Groves, a tone I've gone on about before. As well as weaving magic as one third of GEN F alumni Nautic, Groves releases solo recordings on Bullion's DEEK Recordings. "Dream Story" is taken from her forthcoming EP, Committed Language, and sends her searching tone skimming over gentle synth lines.
"It's about the pursuit of fantasy; the bits of your reality that follow you into your sleep and appear in your dreams in all sorts of guises, the dreams that seem so real they're hard to shake off, and the sometimes blurred line between the two," Groves says of the song over email. "It's a theme I'm often drawn to and a source of constant fascination to me, then I read the book of the same name by Arthur Schnitzler and it seemed to bring a lot of these ideas together."
DEEK Recordings will release Laura Groves' new EP, Committed Language, on February 16th. Preorder it here. If you're in London, catch her at The Lexington this Wednesday 14th January (tickets).
Photo credit: Suzie Howell.
