Peterborough based up-and-coming artist, Mark Stevens releases his first ever EP this month, ‘Rodeo’. The singer-songwriter spent the best part of 2021 recording the four-track album at Laundry Rooms, the studio and label run by Cambridgeshire band Collars.
Flat cap-donning, bearded troubadour Mark Stevens may be based in northwest Cambridgeshire, but his music evokes the sunny climes of California, backed by country riffs straight out of Nashville. Armed only with an acoustic guitar and a tender vocal reminiscent of John Mayer or Damien Rice, Stevens is giving the singer-songwriter genre a refreshing makeover, with sincere, intelligent stories of life and love in all the ugliest and most beautiful moments.
Out on Friday 21 January, the EP opens with the forthcoming new single ‘The Boat Song’ (also out 21 January), a lively offering that should resonate with any listener. “The song initially came from the idea of being at sea,” says Stevens, “so far from home that all you could think about was how to get back faster. Then I wondered if you’d start to forget faces and whether they’d start to forget yours, emphasising that desperate need to be home.”
Also featured are the plucky ‘Santa Fe’, about an unforgettable experience Stevens had in New Mexico; the sincere lament ‘Difficult Days’, about life’s anxieties; and ‘The Bench’, a stripped-back, emotional number written for the singer’s grandfather. “After he died I thought I saw him on a bench,” he explains. “He wasn’t there, of course, but the song is about not letting go.”
Available digitally via Laundry Rooms and produced by Kane Goldstein, the release of ‘Rodeo’ will coincide with the video for lead single ‘The Boat Song’, which was filmed at the 12th-century Peterborough Cathedral.
Mark Stevens will be hosting a launch party for ‘Rodeo’ at The Ostrich in his hometown Peterborough on Thursday 20 January, with fellow local artists Division, Collars and You & I.
