As you may have realised if you’ve read my reviews of LUKA’s previous releases – and I can only hope you have – I am, to put it mildly, a fan (in truth, I have to admit, I’m that kind of fan who has a tendency to gush to anyone who’ll listen). Her songs are heartfelt, ring of the truth of personal experience and connect with your emotions and your soul. And she has a way of taking that personal experience and turning it into something universal, something that helps you understand the experience even if you’ve not lived it.
For ‘Waiting’ she has taken something that I think most, if not all, of us have experienced. Let’s let her explain ‘Waiting is a classic unrequited love song. You like someone who doesn’t feel the same way and end up waiting for things to change, hoping that if you wait
long enough, they might change their mind (they usually don’t). In the end you realise you’ve wasted too much of your life pining after this one person and it’s probably time to get over it and move on. I wrote this when I was in the middle of that sad “why don’t they like me back” stage. Happy to say that I have since moved past being sad about that to just being stressed about the general world. A definite improvement’.
Her words are simple but reach into the depths of that experience; making us feel that yearning, the hoping. I hope you get that when I say ‘simple’ I mean that they do this without resorting to torrid twisted metaphor; something that it would be all too easy to do I’m sure. She’s speaking from the heart. But this makes the song all the more effective.
The words are sung over something a little richer in sound than before; more expansive and layered. There is something of a ‘Twin Peaks’ soundtrack feel in there that reflects the feeling of being haunted by unrequited love; it’s in the guitar. And Mellotron – of all things – adds that ‘big ballad’ feel. And this is big sonically, not so big that it overwhelms the words or LUKA’s wonderfully fragile vocals. Sonically it has that big big sky feeling; it’s big but with space.
And mentioning that soundtrack feel reminds me that this has the feel of something you’d find in the soundtrack of a US arthouse movie – playing while the lead character drifts thoughtfully and internally tortured through landscapes and cityscapes while others go about their lives in the background; out of focus.
‘Waiting’ is beautiful – musically, vocally and lyrically. It’s words and music in unison, in perfect harmony.
