Having focused passion in a song isn’t just about putting forth a powerful vocal alone. It’s about having an intimate relationship with the tone of the verses, an appreciation for the depth of a harmony moving from one line to another, and accentuating the tempo of the music to draw as much emotion from the band supporting you and the lyricism as possible.
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To be perfectly frank, unless you’ve got the kind of talent Taylor Jules does in her new single “My Best Mistake,” it might be best to avoid using the term sharp to describe your music, as the sophistication behind the songcraft commands a lot more respect than the mainstream bare minimum in this genre calls for.
The melodic backbone in this track is pretty rock-savvy and arguably lends a more colorful foundation to the song than we would have been treated to otherwise, and I think Jules was wise to give the more physical parts as grand of a role in the arrangement as she did. Rather than trying to put all of the weight on the percussion alone or even the bottom end, she’s spreading out the sonic distribution in “My Best Mistake” to create something full-bodied and organically larger-than-life, which is a lot harder to do in the studio than you might be thinking
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There’s a generous bassline afforded to this single, but this isn’t to say that Taylor Jules doesn’t know how to straddle it like a legend. Contrarily, she’s got such a fearsome control over the strengths of the low tonal presence in this track that you would assume she’d spent even more time in the spotlight than she has. She’s bringing a lot of creative wit into the game with her here, but this is a performance that shows us she’s both wise and fresh with her creative output (which isn’t something I can say for all of the artists I’ve heard lately).
This beat belongs to Jules’ from the get-go, and I like that she isn’t chasing a big percussive force to shape the chorus in this track. There’s nothing worse than an unbalanced arrangement in this kind of single, and to her credit, I don’t get the impression that we’re listening to an artist who would present us with something as predictable and unfinished as all that. She knows what she’s doing both behind the board and the microphone the same, and she doesn’t mind giving us a little flex in “My Best Mistake” if for no other reason than to remind us of how skilled she is.
Equally as melodic as it is enticing and sensuously constructed to immerse us in passion from beginning to end, I think Taylor Jules’ “My Best Mistake” does her brand a lot of good and only further elevates her status above that of her contemporaries in the pop scene today. This is a premier exhibition of her technique and chosen aesthetical direction, and while it lacks some of the grandiosity that I’ve come to anticipate out of this channel of the underground specifically, I don’t know that this isn’t one of the more efficient examples of brilliance I’ve had the pleasure of listening to this May.
Garth Thomas