Marlon Williams - Make Way For Love

Make Way For Love is the second studio album by New Zealand singer-songwriter Marlon Williams, released in February 2018 via Caroline Australia and Dead Oceans in the US.

Marlon Williams is an award-winning singer-songwriter and guitarist from Lyttelton, New Zealand. He has performed solo as well as with current backing group The Yarra Benders (Imogen Porter, Troy Davis and Kyle Reid). He first came to attention as front-man of The Unfaithful Ways and has also performed and recorded as a duo with Delaney Davidson. Williams' music style straddles folk, country, bluegrass and the blues.

Make Way For Love was recorded with producer Noah Georgeson and his backing band, The Yarra Benders, in North California's Panoramic Studios after several weeks of pre-production in his native Lyttelton, New Zealand with regular collaborator Ben Edwards. The finished result moves Marlon several paces from "country" (the genre that's been affixed to him more than any in recent years, but one that's always been a bit too reductive to be wholly accurate) with forays into cinematic strings, reverb, rollicking guitar and at least one quiet piano ballad.

Known for his effortlessly distinctive voice, Make Way For Love marks Marlon's exponential growth as a songwriter. Throughout eleven original songs, he explores new musical terrain and reveals himself in an unprecedented way in the wake of a fractured relationship.

While the new album draws on Marlon's own story, a new area for him after conscientiously not sharing his own life in song in the past, it captures the vagaries of relationships we've all been through: the bliss, ache, uncertainty, and bitterness. Like the best of breakup records, Make Way For Love doesn't shy away from heartbreak, but rather stares it in the face, and mines beauty from it. Delicate and bold, tender and searing, it's a mightily personal new step for Marlon. The theme for the album is demonstrated on the song "Nobody Gets What They Want Anymore”, a duet with ex-girlfriend Aldous Harding, recorded after the two broke-up.

This album is a 2021 reissue on black vinyl housed in a gatefold sleeve with a download code, pressed in the US via Dead Oceans.