Marguerite is the latest single from Nellie and is a duet with folk singer, Christian Sparacio. We’ve been taking a listen here at the Send Me Your Ears studio today and there’s been lots of smiles all round!.
Marguerite is a fantastic example of modern Americana. The song starts gently with layered guitars and you feel you know exactly what you’re going to get with this track. It feels comfortable and welcoming. A little reminiscent of the Lumineers, perhaps.
As the song progresses, a kick drum is added, followed by some gorgeous harmonies, followed by a perfectly placed tambourine and eventually the bass guitar kicks in and builds the song even more.
There are places throughout this song with just one vocal, and other places sound almost like a full choir, with harmonies and layered vocals spilling over and making the listener feel positively euphoric.
At one point, the instrumentation drops right back to a super-gentle verse before building and building into a fantastic finale which slowly fades out.
Marguerite is a song which we can imagine being fantastic performed live. It feels like the perfect track for a folk club or hipster bar. It needs to be heard, and it needs to be heard in a live setting. There’s just something about it that makes it feel like a summer folk festival anthem.
Marguerite is the brainchild of two people who met via TikTok! Christian reached out to Nellie after finding her on TikTok and expressed an interesting in putting a song together. Hurrah for the internet! This track is a positive and upbeat song which would appeal to anyone who loves modern folk music and Americana.
From a production perspective, we feel that a boost in the 100Hz-150Hz range would give the whole track a little more warmth, particularly when the kick drum comes in. To our ears there is a little too much in the mid-range so a couple of wide cuts centred around 500Hz and around 1.2kHz might help balance things out a little. A wide boost centred around 9kHz would give the whole track a little more presence and brightness.
Perhaps try using a light compressor with some make up gain to give the whole track just a tiny bit more volume overall to bring it into line with commercial releases. It also sounds like one of the guitars is resonating on the note F3. A notch out at around 174Hz would fix this and make it sit a little better in the mix. These are all small adjustments to try and see what you think. As always, this is just to our ears.
Marguerite is a positive sounding, upbeat and bouncy Americana track which ticks all the right boxes for lovers of harmonies and “summer festival” feeling music.