Once troubadours sang not so much about love as about the distance to it – about the road, dust, foreign cities and themselves, changing from verse to verse. Songs appeared from misunderstandings. From letters delivered to the wrong addressee. From promises spoken in a half-voice at the wrong moment. From a ring that leaves a green mark on the finger. Their songs were not a point but a process: the longer you walk, the less sure you are who exactly you were at the beginning of the journey. In this sense, the singer-songwriter from Swansea, Tom Emlyn – is a troubadour of our time, only instead of a lute he has a slightly raspy harmonica, and instead of castles – Welsh suburbs.
photo Keith Bolton
His new single is called “A Series of Misunderstandings”. No claim to epic – life in miniature. And this is, perhaps, the key to his charm: the song, like a prolonged echo of what has been lived through but not fully understood.
Emlyn works with space like an anthropologist-romantic. His Wales – is a state: slightly blurred and hallucinatory, filled with private mythologies and everyday dramas – and precisely therefore universal.
The folk clarity of the melody refers to the sixties, but the arrangement works deeper: the slide guitar smoothly pulls the sound, the banjo played with a bow adds ghostliness, and the solo, recorded in one take, fixes the moment without trying to “improve” it. The spring reverb exposes the lyrics. The music lets the words breathe. And his words – are like small cracks in everyday life. Written more than ten years ago, it patiently waited for its release.
“A Series of Misunderstandings” speaks about a state that never goes out of fashion – the blurriness of identity.
About how a person breaks into versions of themselves: convenient, protective, accidental. Emlyn’s hero – is not so much a character as a set of mismatches. Tom describes this through the image of a tired gunslinger trading stolen jewellery and sorting through memories he would prefer to forget – a metaphor of a state. Creative fatigue: touring empty open mics with a handful of raw sketches and the hope that at least something will “stick”. Attempts to assemble oneself anew from the fragments of failures, awkward conversations and wrong choices. This sounds especially precise in the line about the ring: “The ring you stole for me turned my finger green”. A diagnosis of relationships that were “not the right ones” from the start. The warm, slightly rough Lo-fi sound works as trust: I will not polish this to a mirror shine, because then you will not recognize yourself in the reflection.
Photo Billy Stillman
“A Series of Misunderstandings” was released on April 10 and will become the third single from the summer album. The troubadours, of course, did not survive. But the idea – to wander with songs about tangled feelings and transform everyday disappointments into poetry – has not gone anywhere. Only now instead of a lute – a Stratocaster with spring reverb. And this is, perhaps, the best version of exchange.
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