Raskolnikov once convinced himself that some people are allowed more than others – that they have the right to step over other lives in the name of their own truth. Dostoevsky wrote an entire novel to show the cost of that kind of self-belief: it’s the soul itself. A century and a half later, I don’t think humanity has fully learned the lesson. Some people still sit in a chair that was never meant for them, trying to steer not just their own life, but everyone else’s – convinced they’d do it better.
This age-old conflict is the ground on which “Playing God,” the new single from singer-songwriter Matt DeAngelis, is built – a musician from sunny South Jersey. But where Dostoevsky resolves this dilemma through tragedy, DeAngelis offers a different way out – starting with the music itself. No superpowers, no capes. Just an ordinary person trying to say something that matters: on the scale of the universe, we are relatively insignificant, and true wisdom in hard times means loosening our grip, letting go, and allowing a higher order – or God, as the artist himself puts it – to carry us through.
Musically, the song hits that idea precisely. Piano chords that sound lifted straight from late-’70s and early-’80s records set a restrained, almost liturgical tone, slowly rocking the melody forward. Drums and synths enter gradually, unfolding into a dramatic, cinematic rock track charged with quiet unease. DeAngelis’s vocals reinforce the drama: calm, assured – he sounds like he’s thinking out loud rather than preaching. Midway through, an original, faintly nostalgic synth solo appears, and toward the end the song blooms with an expressive guitar part that gives the track its final sense of scale. The question this piece opened with returns here – but now as a fork in the road.
Raskolnikov claimed: “An extraordinary man has the right… that is, not an official right, but he has it in himself, to allow his own conscience to step over certain obstacles…” Taking the opposite turn at that same fork, Matt DeAngelis leaves us, in “Playing God,” with something closer to an honest admission of human limitation than a sermon or moralizing – even as the religious undertone remains unmistakable. That thought is wrapped in a melodic shell, and if you set the question of faith aside, what remains is universal: control is an illusion we invented to cope with the fear of the unknown. DeAngelis leaves the listener free to hold the wheel or let it go – gently reminding us that the wheel, perhaps, was never really in our hands to begin with.
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