Released earlier this month (21 May on Integrity Records), Echoes is the latest single from Nordic songstress Ida Wenøe and the second track from the former Danish Music Award nominee’s forthcoming third album. Today, we have the pleasure of sharing the accompanying video.
Echoes is a single of two halves with the opening act finding her in the familiar noirish territory we’ve grown to love as her voice and finger-picked ’59 Guild take centre stage. Act 2 is announced as her full band joins in, heading deep into Americana, vintage folk-rock, psych-tinged territory – totally out there. Ida Wenøe’s vocals are carried aloft upon a deep thunderous gallop charmed up by Anders Haaning’s drums and Magnus Knudsen’s bass while Tobias Fröberg’s organ adds light and psychedelic colours alongside Wenøe’s vocals and multi-instrumental offerings. This really is a powerful single, instantly contemporary sounding but also so classic – calling to mind some of the best vintage sounds I miss in the music of today. What’s not to love? Exceptionally well-crafted as always…hold on to tour seat.
The song’s theme explores our distant memories of who we once were, now just an echo from afar. The love we once experienced, so great, with its warm embrace, is now a distant Bel Canto, a vague echo, no more than a mild tingling on the surface of the skin.
Of the song’s creation and the video, Ida tells us:
“Echoes was written on a desolate farm in Värmland, Sweden. I went up there just before Christmas and was completely isolated for 2 weeks, with only the mice keeping me company, and the sound of the wind in the trees outside being the only voices besides my own. I didn’t see another human being for those two weeks, and that certainly had an effect on the song.
“A lot of people have been isolated this past year, so it may seem a bit weird for me to want to be even more alone, but I needed that complete silence to get in tune with myself again, as it’s been such a challenge to find anything to write about, with the virus being so present in everything everyone has done and talked about.
“I wanted the video to illustrate that isolation, with the curtains floating behind me showing cracks of the world outside calling upon us. The first part is in black and white to reflect the stillness; and the second half, where the band comes in, is in colour as a way of showing everything starting to wake up again.”
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