Photo by Kelly Davidson
The Singles Bar: Anne Stott colors in muted tones with ‘Future Ruin’
Stott’s new song unsettles the emotions.
Welcome to The Singles Bar, a review series focused on new single and song releases.
Anne Stott unpacks a melancholic performance that counterbalances the inert velocity of percussion. It’s almost as though she’s chasing down her own shadow, as a way to process the overwhelming sadness coursing in her veins. Her pain oozes from all sides, yet her voice remains crystalline and immovable. Seeping from her body, the lyrics pour forth like liquid from a stream.
That’s the experience in listening to “Future Ruin,” deliciously plodding on the verses before erupting with volcanic ash in the chorus. The song, produced by longtime collaborator Barb Morrison, wiggles into the ear canal. Whispers haunt the listener, with Stott attempting to finally put her misery to rest. “A heartbreak merry-go-round,” she describes in hushed tones. In painting with muted colors, the singer-songwriter strikes to the heart of what it means to love and hurt. “Tear me down!” she later caterwauls into the night sky.
“Future Ruin” captures “those moments when we can watch ourselves doing the same thing that got us in the same mess before, but we don’t know how to change,” she explains, “and you desperately want someone else to break you open, but you can’t quite find the courage to ask.”
The sweeping, delicately-spun ballad also flips through “the fleeting nature of connection” and “that dreamlike state of what almost was, like you can almost touch the moments where what you wanted was lost.”
In summation, “Future Ruin” mangles and rearranges “the hypnotizing nature of our sadness” in a four-minute epoch. There’s no escaping its blistering edge – there’s only acceptance and resignation for what was and hoping tomorrow will be a better day. Stott spends every emotional coin she has in her arsenal, delivering a career-setting performance that’ll surely point her to the cosmos.
Listen to “Future Ruin” below.
