Music should carry with it an emotional hit.
If you don’t feel anything then it isn't doing its job.
It’s not often that it overwhelms you though.
It’s a rare beast of a song that can snatch your breath away
while raising the hair on your neck and leaving you tongue tied and struggling
to articulate just what it is that moved you so much.
The ones that do are of course all considered to be timeless
classics.
They are the evergreen songs that garner ever more fans with
each generation that they are introduced to.
Artists such as Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Janis Joplin, Ray
Charles, Stevie Wonder and Billie Holiday all have songs like this that litter
their back catalogues, and because of that they are rightly referred to as
legendary performers.
And now with the song “Since you've been away” a young woman
called Melisa Kelly could be on the cusp of kicking at the door to be allowed
into the club that they are all members of.
It would be easy to consider such high praise as hyperbolic,
but it literally is the sort of song that urges others to put their reputations
on the line for it.
As it reaches the last bars it elicits some very strong
feelings.
One being that you have just heard something that is utterly
magnificent.
Imagine the moment when the tape stopped rolling on Percy
Sledge singing “When a man loves a woman” and how that must have felt.
Hold onto that feeling, and that is it encapsulated in a
moment.
John H Hammond who discovered Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday,
Aretha Franklin and Bruce Springsteen would rise from the dead to sign this
young lady on the strength of this one track.
Anyone that doesn't feel that frisson of excitement from
hearing it must be missing some sort of empathic component in their make up.
In a sense you don’t listen to the song, but instead feel
it.
If this is a case of lightning striking once then so be it,
but if Melisa can deliver an albums worth of material of a similar strength
then a platinum selling career may well be waiting for her.
With the album available on the 14th of July we don't have long to wait to see what happens.
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