This brand-new song is so exquisitely written that Ive ended up listening to it on endless repeat something like 20 times in a row tonight. When I hear something this good its both exhilarating that someone can write something like this, but also a little discouraging to think of how rarely most of us can ever achieve this level of songwriting. It helps that shes got one of the most fascinating and expressive voices of our time, but only a little. It would be a great song even with someone elses vocal, and since that may be the goal, perhaps it will be. It may be just a roughly recorded home demo but even in this raw form its already more powerful than at least 80% of polished recordings we hear in the modern era. The song itself feels in every way perfectly balanced, with its three intense and devastatingly descriptive monologue-like verses of personal struggle alternating with a sparser, upwardly yearning chorus with a simple lyric that sears like a mantra of affirmation. The rich harmonies interrelate between verse and chorus, but in contrast to the conversational verses, the melody of the chorus soars to increasingly leaping intervals (rising fifth, rising sixth, rising major seventh) that strain against despair toward hope. This song is frighteningly great, stealthily great. The more attention you give to it, the more you find there. Its inspiring: as music, as poetry, as singing, as a a glimpse of a kind of perfect artisanry and craft that we all strive for but can almost never achieve. Elizabeth is a genius -- this is not news to anyone who follows her work, but it remains a profound truth still inexplicably under-acknowledged in the wider world of music.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 06:18:31 +0000
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