This song is something special, it’s easy to tell – just after the first few seconds, you find yourself wrapped up in the sound and you want to know what it’s all about. The acoustic guitar playing works so beautifully with the soulful r&b-like tones of the artist’s leading vocal. What takes the song from good to great though is the subject matter, the lyricism, the context. The whole idea of a letter to the rest of the universe, it really puts things into perspective, it makes you think about things in a way that you probably don’t very often.
There’s a lot of negativity presented in the lyrics, and yet the music sounds beautiful; soaked in a little bit of sadness, but peaceful, with a faint yet constant glimmer of hope. This contrast in itself makes for a perfectly fitting creation to represent the way the world is. The artist has written a song that makes you hang on every word, and it doesn’t feel like wasted time – it feels like you’re genuinely listening to something real, something undeniably honest. It’s a huge bonus that the track has been so superbly performed. The gentle nature of this music is gorgeous to listen to on it’s own, but when an artist is expressing such a real and relevant point of view, it adds a massive amount of value to what you experience when you listen.
Technically speaking, this artist’s music fuses together a little bit of folk music, the storytelling, the acoustic guitar, with a slightly classical or European style of finger-picking, a seductively smooth rhythm and blues type vocal, and a little bit of that hip-hop edge with the idea of the ghetto and the occasional spoken moment. This fusion is brilliantly effective, it’s fresh, interesting, and sounds fantastic. It’s a great introduction to the artist and is likely to bring people back to hear more from him. Myself included.
By Rebecca Cullen
