“… it makes possible passion and pain, healing and hurt, longing and lust” / My Love by Lily
Something about movies and music goes together. It feels sometimes there’s a place where they co-exist, a timeless place somewhere in America where silver-shelled diners welcome the lovelorn, where bruised romantics in just-so hats come for eggs over easy and a coffee, and linger to check out the mystery looker who pulled up outside in a candy-red Cadillac.
As with any song or movie featuring a woman and a man, you know that love is at stake. And writer Billie Reid delivers a characteristically truthful lyric from a songbook that you just know gets written in during the wee small hours – emotional honesty is not a job for the 9-5 inclined, and part of the confession here is one we can all recognise … is this attraction the start of something special, or is it a sexual thing, and can’t that sexual thing be special?
The soundscape of ‘My Love’ suggests such a place, not through any specific details of Americana, but for its general air of heightened reality. Like Billie himself says, “I write from heart when spirit moves me”, and this song has the feel of something that expressed itself fully-formed. There’s an effortless vibe about the way it unfolds, something right about it like a white picket fence, yet with that sense of wrong underneath you’ll see in the films of David Lynch.
What stands out here is the combination of depth and finesse. All too often, capable players and quality production are put in the service of material that frankly doesn’t deserve it. Here, the instrumentation on ‘My Love’ is sympathetic and un-showy. Plaintive guitar expresses itself as it does to serve the lyric, which is what true musicianship is about. Pianist Paul Bley once commented that a piano has 88 notes, but he’d got his playing down to the handful that meant something to him. There’s a similar commitment to making every note work in this song. No need to embellish when singers and song are already delivering with conviction.
There’s a lucid quality to Lily’s voice, a desire for simplicity, whilst yearning for mystery. It’s the tension between these aspects that makes things interesting when one person opens up to another. It makes possible passion and pain, healing and hurt, longing and lust.
Charlie Reynolds