say what you want
say what you want
say what you will
just don’t leave me alone“This is My Way of Saying That I’m Sorry”
There are some albums that demand your attention. Wintersong, a live album by Dakota Suite’s Chris Hooson and pianist Quentin Sirjacq, is not one of them. It is a soft and gentle album, perhaps even a bit distant, that makes no demands on the listener. As such, if you listen to it while doing literally anything else, it may make only the slightest of impressions: pretty to be sure, but unremarkable. Like looking at frost on a window from across the room, Wintersong will fade into a vague, opaque experience until you get closer and see the beautiful details of that thin layer of ice on glass with its crystalline structures and intricate pathways and surprising beauty.
Over the course of eleven tracks, we hear only a single voice, entwined, like a lover, by a single piano. This intimacy is best rewarded, as lovers always are, by giving the album your full attention and letting it enfold you completely. Make yourself some coffee or tea, put on headphones, and find a comfortable seat near a window—preferably on a winter day with a snowstorm outside—and set aside 50 minutes to breathe and listen. Truly listen to the way that Hooson’s voice nearly breaks on the line “I made you promises that I did not keep,” or the soft inhale at the end of the song “This is My Way of Saying That I’m Sorry.” Allow the piano’s icy raindrops at the end of “A Comfortable Lie” to cascade into your heart and feel the fragility of Hooson’s voice as the lines “I never meant to break your heart / or make you lose your way,” are overwhelmed by Sirjacq’s playing on “Last Flare from a Desperate Shipwreck.” Let yourself remember just how simple joy can be with the lullaby quality of “In the Stillness of the Night” and its unadorned refrain of “I love you / yes I do.”
If you allow it, Wintersong can be a balm for the heart: helping you to reflect, with honesty and beauty, on all those loves and losses that make up a lifetime. These songs don’t make the storm outside go away, but, if you give yourself to them wholeheartedly, they will hold you tight and remind you that you are not alone in facing the cold of a gray and winter’s day.