“Take This Heart of Gold” is the last song on Blindfaller, the 2016 record Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz released as Mandolin Orange on Yep Roc, five years before the pair took the name Watchhouse. Marlin wrote it.
It is placed where it is deliberately. Blindfaller is a quiet album that spends much of its length on weighty subjects — one of its songs follows a single idea from the Revolutionary War through the Civil War — and it closes on this: a love song, offered simply, the title itself a promise. The effect is of a record setting down what it has been carrying.
The arrangement is the duo’s usual spare one. Marlin plays guitar and mandolin and sings the lead, Frantz plays fiddle and sings the harmony, and Clint Mullican holds the bottom on bass. There is very little else, and the song is built so that there does not need to be. It has had a long life in the pair’s live shows, where it is among the pieces most often asked for, and it is frequently taken up by other acoustic players — the kind of song that sounds as though it has always been around.
Marlin and Frantz had been playing together for the best part of a decade by the time they made Blindfaller, most of it on the road, and the record has the settled quality of two musicians who no longer need to explain anything to each other. The song trusts that: it says what it has to say once, and stops.
