Laying your heart on the line is a hard thing to do.
We might want to express the deepest, least-known parts of our love but we fear saying it wrong or being misunderstood and simply having all that honesty treated not in the way we intend.
But these five artists, in common with music artists who love and breathe their art and pour their hearts and souls into it, dare to be brutally honest on all kinds of things and the result is songs that really speak to you in powerfully moving ways.
Listening is wonderful but engaging and being changed by the music you listen to is even better and if you listen to these five beautiful works of musical art, you’ll know precisely what that feels like.
“A Driver Saved My Night” by Sigrid
Saying something or someone has saved you is a pretty big call.
But it’s one that talentred Norwegian pop singer-songwriter Sogrid, who ails from Ålesund on the country’s lower west coast seems happy to make when she declares in A Drived Saved My Night” that a driver saved her on a night when she need to lose yourself in music with just the right song selection.
The infectiousness of this luminously lovely slice of pop reflects just how much music can matter and how it can shift moods, reshape rality for the better and give us a sense of companionship when maybe we feel a little, or a lot, alone.
“A Driver Saved My Night”, lifted from Sigrid’s How to Let Go album, is a sublimely escapist piece of pop that percolates along with a reassuring gentleness even as she goes hard and deep on how powerful music can be and how when things seem dark, it can make all the difference in the world.
Even in an Uber …
“Only Wanna Be With You” by Amy Shark
Love is an intoxicatingly beautiful thing.
You meet someone who was a stranger only seconds earlier and suddenly they are your whle wonderfully delightful world.
It’s one of the best feelings ever and Amy Shark captures it all in its evocative glory in “Only Wanna Be With You”, the ebiullient lyrics of which are matched by upbeat music which mirrors the ecstasy of the words to a spine-tingling degree.
The beauty of this song from the Australian singer-songwriter-guitarist from the Gold Coast in Queensland is that all the joy ricocheting around your heart finds expression in this song that will take that frenetic joyfulness and send it to your feet for some serious dancing in no time flat!
“All By Myself” by Alok, Sigala & Ellie Goulding
English singer-songwriter Ellie Goulding knows her way around an upbeat ode to existential joy.
“All By Myself”, which features fellow music artists Alok and Sigala, is an empoweringly declarative track that soars on the liberating epiphany that it’s so selfish to want to look after and celebrate yourself.
It apparently came from a very personal place for the artist.
“It was such an incredible experience to work with Alok and Sigala on this new track – they’re both such unique and amazing artists and coming together was a delight. I hope this song gives people the self-love and power that I felt when writing it. We need to make sure we’re loving and taking care of ourselves so we can receive the same from those around us.” (Music News)
The song is a soul-nurturing marriage of affirmative lyrics and positivity-laced music, making it the perfect soundtrack to self-discovery and self-care.
“Get What You Want” by Lastlings
Hailing from the Gold Coast, Lastlings are an electronic pop band made up of brother and sister combo Amy and John Dowdle.
Styled with delicious synth stylings and making evocative use of Amy’s emotive vocals, their song “Get What You Want” features, notes Electronic Groove, “lush chords and ethereal, textured vocals over a solid low end as artists showcase their musical maturity and evolution.”
Like the other songs featured in this post, the song addresses some weighty subject matter from a personal perspective that resonates with raw honesty.
“It explores mental health and the relationship that I have with myself. It’s about putting myself out there and not letting doubt get in the way of what I truly want. ‘I’ve got a lot of enemies that live inside my head’. This song isn’t about love for another person, it’s about my relationship with myself. ‘You’ refers to a darker version of myself that I am trying to fight and overcome.” (Amy, Electronic Groove)
“Witness to Your Love” by Garbage
I have loved Garbage, the rock band from Madison, Wisconsin, ever since I heard their first self-titled album in 1995.
Their songs growled with passion, power, thoughtfulness and a defiance that really spoke to the young man in me coming to grips with who he was after years of bullying at school and in the church and trying to find his way through life on his terms, not those around him.
Their music spoke to me in just an all-encompassing way and while you could expect that a band so long in the game might have lost their sheen almost thirty years after forming in 1993, their latest single, “Witness to Your Love”, lifted from their new Anthology greatest hits collection shows they have lost none of their incisiveness and spark.
It surges with an emotivesness and intensity that still has a lyrical knowingness that gets to the idea of life in all its forms; in this case, looking back on the past and musing on what love and freedome once looked like.
It’s rich and full, lyrically and musically and is proof that getting older artistically doesn’t mean the end of impactful, highly-listenable musicmaking.
SONGS, SONGS AND MORE SONGS EXTRA!
ABBA has another lyric video out! This time for their classic 1976 hit “Money Money Money”, the second single lifted from their Arrival album (the one with the iconic helicopter cover) and, as with all the other lyric videos releaesd so far, it’s a beautiful meld of the original clip’s 1920s-styled visuals and those deftly placed words that muse, with longing and a sense of existential weariness, about how wonderful it must be to be rich and have not a care in the world …
