UK singer-songwriter Billie Marten made her new album Dog Eared within a thriving creative community in upstate New York, and the singles so far have been fantastic. She offered up another one today, a casual sigh of a song called “Leap Year” that drifts along as though buoyed by gusts of graceful melancholia. She wrote it in bed on Leap Day 2024; it’s billed as Marten’s first non-autobiographical song, the story of a couple who can only get together every four years when February 29 comes around again.
