Our Song of the Day is “I Needed You‘, the lead single for Brooklyn-based folk songwriter Eliza Edens‘ sophomore album We’ll Become the Flowers. It’s a powerful song that reveals the complex and beautiful way Edens moulds a song. Her vocal delivery is slow and easy, hints of melancholia are almost playfully framed as Dexter Wolfe’s lap steel weeps over the words “I needed you”. Just over halfway through, the mood changes; a moment in the video that’s marked by a change of scenery and which finds Edens holding a child’s tape recorder on a palm beach sidewalk, grinning and singing, “rock n roll baby, turn the dial”.
The beauty of Edens’ approach to her music is her open-mindedness and her willingness to revisit her feelings toward past events. You can hear the energy of that effort in her music, it shines. When going into each recording session, she invited experimentation which led them to reconceptualize many of her songs. Like a good photo, how you frame a subject makes all the difference and Edens provides a masterclass in composition.
The album press describes how Edens reimagines endings not as finite events but as devotional experiences that give way to new beginnings….What emerges is a glowing collection of songs that serve as a map through the tumult, toward hope.
Talking about the single, Eliza says:
“I Needed You” explores the liminal space that exists near the end of a relationship – when you’re vacillating between “I need them” and “I don’t need them.” It’s about trying to discover and center your own needs when sometimes it’s easier to lie to yourself and ignore them. It’s about perhaps not even knowing what you need and being okay with that. I initially wrote this song as a sad little breakup waltz, but when I showed it to my collaborators, they elevated it into a slow burn rocker that had me laughing by the end.
We’ll Become Flowers is out on 14th October.
Pre-Order here: https://eliza-edens.bandcamp.com/album/well-become-the-flowers
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