An Enoian bit of reflective songwriting
One of my friends described a recent torture she went through—specifically, they went to see one of those sad acoustic songwriter shows where everything’s quiet and gentle. She told it to me with the pain one might wear if they’d recently escaped from something truly harrowing. I think she’s crazy for this, to be honest, and I won’t be suggesting W.Y. Huang’s new single to her. Sorry, Jessi.
But for everyone else, this is like a mug of warm tea grew up and decided to become a song.
There’s a bit of Iron & Wine to the production here, the way you feel safe to really crank up your headphones/stereo system so every subtlety of texture can wash over. I really love these sorts of recordings, the space and almost meditative Eno-ian—can we say that, Enoian?—quality that lets the listener float through Haung’s songwriting.
There’s a temptation, when laying pads on a track like this, to bury everything in it. The audio equivalent of dunking your Oreo cookie too long and then it breaks off and drops down into the milk, Huang avoids that pitfall and so the listener isn’t digging around in the cup with a fork trying to—okay, maybe the analogy doesn’t carry all the way through. The instrumentation is tasteful and sparse, nothing overstays its welcome.
I would love to catch them live to see how this is handled in person—but I won’t be bringing Jessi.
Written by Willow Stonebeck
