“When You Let It Fall Away” is vintage Kerr: introspective but not wallowy; serene but not blasé; slow but not sleepy.
Happy New Year, lily folk. I’m chuffed to say we’re opening 2025 with some singer-songwriter fare by way of Ally Kerr, whose music is perfect for your start-of-the-year reboot needs.
November’s “Back Again” was sweet, innocent, and doggedly uninterested in rattling any cages, and it made for a fine Lilystars debut for Kerr. And today’s new single, the affecting “When You Let It Fall Away,” is cut from familiar cloth, you could say.
It’s got that same calming fingerstyle picking, that sublime piano bed, that ebb-and-flow melody. Topically, Kerr shares it’s about “the experience of letting go of attachments to thoughts and beliefs,” in other words a manner of negotiating between “a conditioned mind” and a “more expansive” sense of self, and it shows.
Until it doesn’t.
Which is OK.
Because when faced with an absolute hammock-on-the-beach of a tune, all cerebral impulses fall by the wayside. And “When You Let It Fall Away” is that kind of release: introspective but not wallowy; serene but not blasé; slow but not sleepy. What the track does is sensitize the listener into wakefulness, because, in a sense, intellectualizing creativity, ideology, or philosophy isn’t the same as creativity, ideology, or philosophy.
Kerr also goes on to share, moreover, how its writing was “prompted by a need to find [a] blissful space” that is far removed “from the endless chatter of the mind.”
“Writing this was really helpful when I was doing more mindfulness practice and awareness,” he shares further, and more than gifting us with another hummable ditty, he’s also given us a reminder to chew on: that music can be therapeutic in ways that go beyond textbook definitions of healing; it can provide reprieve like the unlikeliest of songs have provided us reprieve.
The written word and the struck chord, in the more-than-able hands of a tunesmith as emotionally involved and cognizant as Ally Kerr, can do wonders to the listener. For those who get off in a steady diet of “Landslide”-era Mac and solo-era Lennon (“Look at Me” comes to mind), “Fall Away” is a more-than-welcome gift.
“[It helped] establish myself in presence, and [stay] between the flow of thoughts. Sometimes songs are a bit like that: they can help you, support you,” Kerr tells us in an advance release.
No truer words have been spoken. Stream it today.