In the broadest of daylights, Marta Arpini is feeling all of her feelings – finally. The Italian-born and Amsterdam-based singer-songwriter-composer follows up her 2022 volt-face I Am a Gem with Tender Superpower, an album of deep, personal catharsis and homespun magic that takes the trained jazz vocalist even further into indie folk territory.
In contrast with I Am a Gem’s more intuitive bustle, Tender Superpower is an unmistakable studio record, inspired by the understated wizardry of Blake Mills and Andy Shauf. A collaborative, co-dictatorial effort by Arpini and producer Mark Schilders (Fabrik, Weval), their respective jazz compatriots were brought in one by one this time, each bringing their own to Arpini’s careful and deceptively simple arrangements. In a place of pastel-coloured bliss, her bright and diaristic lyricism, akin to that of Elliot Smith and Adrianne Lenker, finds its footing.
Ever since her Edison-nominated debut album Forest Light (2019), recorded with her eponymous acoustic jazz quintet, Arpini has been straying further and further away from her beginnings. Born in Crema, she studies jazz vocals in Milan, which she further pursues with a master’s degree at the Amsterdam conservatory.
But the more Arpini progresses into jazz academia, the more appealing it becomes to let all of it go. ‘When I moved to Amsterdam,’ Arpini says, ‘I was exposed to very different ways of interpreting music, and I immediately became much more interested in writing music than just learning how to be a skilled vocalist.’ The music of ECM jazz luminary Bill Frisell has a particular impact. ‘He writes such simple songs, which for a jazz musician is quite insane. But then his way of writing ‘simple music’ is very dense and interesting. I started studying what he was doing, and it became clear to me that I wanted to go back to songs.’ Irrepressible becomes the urge to rid herself of genre limitations, to ‘clear the air’, and find a place where she can ‘unapologetically be what I want to be.’
Her first album-length batch of pop songs comes together in a 48-hour frenzy, as she records I Am a Gem with a full band and minimal overdubs. How different is the process that brings forth Tender Superpower.
It’s the summer of 2022 when songs, half-songs, and simple voice memos suddenly coalesce, as Arpini finds herself in a moment of upheaval. At home and all alone for the first time in a long time, she decides that by the end of that week, she wants to send a fully demoed album to her producer. ‘It was a way of escaping, but also using this emotion, this energy that you have after a major life event. Okay, I’m feeling a lot – what do I do with all these feelings? I work with them!’
Songs that in some cases were over two years old ‘but never found a way of being’ come rising to the surface. Songs about a certain someone, like ‘Spring But With The Snow’, in which she wishes she was still but a one-hour train ride away from visiting her mother in Crema. Songs about dreamlike composites, like ‘Comet’, which draws from ‘an ancient feeling triggered by an entirely different person, years after’. And one song, ‘Little Love’, born from that one solitary week in her Amsterdam apartment. ‘Some songs were quite hard to write,’ she says. ‘They were like therapy sessions. But ‘Little Love’ just felt like breathing out to me.’
Allowing yourself to feel things, to really feel things, had been something ‘very controversial’ to Arpini in recent years. Most of Tender Superpower comes from feelings suppressed and feelings bursting at the seams. But at the end of that one week, as she sent the demos to her producer, came a ‘peaceful presence’ that carried over into the recording process, months later. ‘I had the urge for it to be hyper personal, and then to move on. It’s like you’re looking into my bedroom through the keyhole. I felt like that’s how it had to be.’
