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Spotlight -- Jessie Ware

Track Review (4/17/2021)

What’s better than dancing your sad feelings away? Jessie Ware creates the perfect pop song for that. In her first single off of her record, What’s Your Pleasure?, Ware encapsulates the pain and longing that comes with heartbreak in the beautifully produced, disco-soaked track, “Spotlight.” 

“Spotlight” opens with humming strings, accentuated by light piano. Ware’s breathy vocals float gently over the instrumentals. The song crescendos, as more strings are layered in the polyharmonic arrangement and Ware exhales “Tell me when I’ll get more / Than a dream of you,” confessing her troubles with letting a past lover go against the richly arranged instruments. 

Suddenly, however, the track crashes down, grounded by a 4-on-the-floor beat. The strings and piano make way for bouncy, dark synthesizers that drive the Hi-NRG tempo of the track. Light handclaps in the back add to the lush, opulent groove of the song, and distorted, squeaky bass and light electronic harmonies complement Ware’s vocals beautifully. 

Throughout “Spotlight,” Ware’s voice glides above the instrumentals. She elegantly yearns for someone who has left her, describing the emotions that have consumed her. “Do anything to make you stay / Do anything to start the day again,” Ware opines. As the chorus approaches, her vocals are layered to accentuate her longing. Her voice in the lines, “If only I could leeetttt you go / If only I could beee alooone,” drip with lushly layered harmonies, as Ware seemingly yearns for this person with every morsel of her being.

As the track proceeds, Ware convinces herself to accept her fate. “Can’t stop the sun from rising / Can’t keep the air we’re breathing / Can’t stop your heart from leaving,” she sings, acknowledging that her heartbreak is inevitable, with funky electronic sounds in the background answering her calls. 

Eventually, Ware’s longing pares down to a whispery “Tell me when I get more than a dream of you.” Ware’s vocals gradually fade away and the underlying beat, synthesizers, and distorted bassline is all that’s left for you to hear. 

Although Ware takes much of her inspiration from the disco movements of the past, this pop song is unlike any you’ve heard before. An amalgamation of many different types of dance genres, “Spotlight” shines the light on Ware’s talent for creating nostalgic, yet forward-thinking pop music. 

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Track Review -- 4/7/2021

“Mythological Beauty” by Big Thief

Having one’s first child at seventeen is a heartrending task for a teenager on the cusp of adulthood. Adrianne Lenker understands this pain more than anyone else. On the emotional centerpiece of Big Thief’s sophomore album, Capacity, Lenker explores the sacrifices young mothers make for their children through the autobiographical track, “Mythological Beauty.” 

Percussion and guitar introduce the sparse allure of “Mythological Beauty.” Adrianne Lenker’s voice is the focal point of the track, her tone ranging from whispery lows to wailing highs, each extreme emphasizing important aspects of her mother’s life and Lenker’s own childhood. As the track unfolds, Lenker bluntly depicts the birth of her mother’s first child in a low, throaty undertone, “Seventeen, you took his cum / And you gave birth to your first life.” Only one line after, though, she exclaims, “You gave Andrew a family who you thought would love and take better care,” her voice reaching its gritty upper limit, palpable with grief as Lenker relates to her mother’s difficult decision to give her first-born child to a foster family. The dizzying highs and lows of young parenthood is reflected in Lenker’s voice, as she skillfully navigates the highs and lows of her own vocal range. 

Throughout the track, the lyrics are simple and unassuming. Instead of laying her emotions bare in her words, Lenker reveals her inner thoughts in her singing, which embellish and color her acute observations on her childhood. The lyrics recall a naive honesty, as if she is simply a child pointing out truths in her world, making the emotional intensity of her narration all the more transfixing. As the track reaches its conclusion, she meditates on a near-death childhood accident, when a railroad spike fell on her head. Her voice pierces through the drums and guitar as she sings, “You held me in the backseat with a dishrag / Soaking up blood with your eye.” But just as soon as her voice soars upward, it also gently floats back down, as she sighs, “I was just five and you were twenty-seven / Praying, ‘Don’t let me baby die.’” Although the lyrics do not tell much about Lenker’s attitude towards her mother, her voice betrays how she feels: sympathy and forgiveness toward her mother’s mistakes, as all mothers are bound to make. 

Few tributes to motherhood are as brutally honest yet painfully beautiful as Big Thief’s “Mythological Beauty.”