The Singles Bar: Si Clancy asks ‘What’ll It Be?’
The folk-pop singer-songwriter asks the hard questions with a new song.
Welcome to The Singles Bar, a review series focused on new single and song releases.
When a friendship comes crashing down, your lungs fill with debris. The once-elegant and serene relationship, a gentle and passionate give and take of love, ideas, connection, hope, crumbles underneath a disturbing weight of gloom. The uncertainty of what’s next buckles, and you’re only left with a bitter taste lingering on your tongue. British folk-pop singer and songwriter Si Clancy grieves over a formerly flourishing friendship, which became tangled and mangled from lack of oxygen. “What’ll It Be?” is dressed with glistening acoustic guitar and fiddle, but there’s a sobering darkness draped over his shoulders. “Last call, you thought you knew it all,” he sings, barbed and lonesome. “But there’s only so much you can see…”
“Let’s talk of endless fantasy,” he bribes on the second verse, his attempts to reconcile the past fall on deaf ears. “Now, I just can’t get you off my mind / I wonder…will I see / Now, you find yourself lost in the machine / One last victory dances / All you need / Now, you’re bringing me down / If I said I’m sorry, will you sail with me?”
His inquiries shrivel and twist into dust, as they flutter down to pepper in between the cracks of the instruments. Combined together, he plots a sea-bound journey through his emotions as a way to cope, to relearn, to rediscover. The harmony plants straight-away as eerie shape-shifting ghouls fated to haunt him even further. “A new friendship is twisted into a bittersweet sense of uncertainty amidst the machine of the mundane and the mire of daily routine and responsibility,” Clancy explains of the track. “That idea is where the title of the EP germinated. The uncertainty leads to bitterness, leads to distance, and ultimately to self-doubt, hostility and a host of questions about where you go from here”
“What’ll It Be” sits smack dab in the middle of Clancy’s new EP, Lost in the Machine, a solemn three-song set of tunes about life, loss and love. Recorded at Leicester’s Yellow Bean Studios in Leicester, and later mastered at the legendary halls of Abbey Road Studios in London, the project heaves withered gasps among expansive and vibrant musicianship, cutting between bluegrass and traditional folk music. As the music swells and spins in mid air, Clancy’s voice remains firmly on the ground, and you forget exactly how mesmerizing it really is until you hit the final few bars, and it all washes over you, anew.
Listen below:
