Songs based on real, personal stories touch me in some special way. Honestly, I don’t even know why – maybe because behind them you can feel a weight that cannot be imitated. Fictional drama is audible immediately, but when a person sings about what actually happened to them – a certain particular roughness appears. Like a scar that is not quite symmetrical, but that is exactly why it is real. The more personal the story, the harder it is to tell – and the stronger it resonates when it sounds.
“Drowning” – the new single by Michelle Rose – is one of those. The story of its creation began in the shadow of an abusive relationship that ended with a real criminal sentence for her former partner. Michelle wrote it more than five years ago, being at the epicenter of an emotional storm. For a long time the track lay “in the drawer” – and that is understandable: it is hard to sing about something that is still bleeding. In the sound, you can feel the confident hand of producer Roy Hamilton III – he masterfully builds a dense, dark indie-pop atmosphere with a pulsating rhythm. The twilight and slightly detached sound perfectly conveys the effect of dissociation after trauma.
In the lyrics, Rose does not emphasize details – after all, this is not a crime chronicle. She wrote and performed a song about the inner state of a person who made the right and incredibly difficult choice, and is now sorting out what that choice left inside.
“Drowning” can be called a symbolic period in her personal story and the beginning of a new stage in her music career. Michelle Rose addresses women who find themselves in similar circumstances, reminding them that they are not left alone with their struggle. This could have sounded too loud, if not for the eight years of silence behind these words and a very concrete reason – fear. And the fact that the song came out after all says no less.
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