“This album is about my journey up to this point. Wanderer, the album, represents the course my life has taken in this journey – going from town to town, with my guitar, telling my tale; with reverence to the people who did this generations before me. Folk singers, blues singers, and everything in between.
They were all wanderers, and I am lucky to be among them.”
– Chan Marshall, 2018
Now forty-six and a single mother, this maturity was not easily won; After dealing with health scares, moving abroad, and creative disputes with her former label, Wanderer is a triumphant return from one of our generation’s greatest songwriters.
Her first release on Domino Records, the album was initially rejected by her former label Matador as commercially unviable. While it is true these songs are not what one would think of as typical Top 40 fare, they have something far rarer and more lasting – a transcendence of human experience. Marshall’s work has always had a heaviness to it, but after struggling with addiction, depression, and an autoimmune disorder, these new tracks feel like they are written by a musician in her prime and free of restrainment. On “Robbin Hood”, Chan dismantles the futility of working to please an outside party:
We are lucky, then, that Domino picked up this record, otherwise we would have ourselves been robbed, as the album is full of memorable moments. With Lana del Rey guesting on “Woman, and a powerful cover of Rihanna’s “Stay”, the album is full of a warmth and defiance that full embodies a musician destined to leave a legacy.