"I Will Go" by Noah Seleno
Review
I mentioned recently the sense of frustration I feel waiting for highly anticipated releases or sitting on articles telling you about them until the time is right.
Fortunately with Noah Seleno that is less of an issue (though I admit to waiting some years for her to record her original songs in the first place) as she tends to let them loose without prior warning: today's "I Will Go" being the latest.
If you have to be surprised, then surprises of this quality have an extra lustre.
Produced by Jodi Style, the song is apparently a harbinger for an entire EP (not that we have a precise date for it but it's something to look forwards to).
It's good when the music & words complement each other as directly as they do here: I can't think of many songs with such an insistent guitar part: if the singer is telling us about leaving then her playing is not so much ushering her out of the door as racing her to it.
Well, you've read enough of my Noah Seleno reviews before to guess some of the adjectives I might be using: I hate repeating myself but genuinely certain descriptions fit & demand to be redeployed.
Like its immediate predecessor "Unkind", "I Will Go" showcases her lower, earthier register which works highly effectively: a unique voice which somehow simultaneously evokes both the natural world & all of its fundamental passions and higher more soulful matters: not quite sure how she pulls that off (I am sure that it's her gift and not anything she's contrived: she reeks of honesty after all).
Given this similarity, it's also worth noting that a case that in some respects the theme is a sequel to "Unkind": however that's at best part of it I think as another aspect is that this is perhaps Noah's most classic song. So many of her other songs are so deeply idiosyncratic but here she most closely approaches the canon of work she covers live in addition to her own material.
You can't mistake a Noah Seleno song: her delivery is so exceptional and her writing so emotionally deep that you can get a great deal of pleasure out of listening to what is sounds like regardless of the meaning of the words. When you focus in on them though, deeper you go…. Some people might get lost in these songs. I do myself from time to time.
