FATHER OF THE YEAR, AKA SINGER-SONGWRITER CAMERON REED,
RELEASES “WHEN YOU HOLD YOUR BREATH” ON FATHER’S DAY VIA 444%
LISTEN / SHARE “WHEN YOU HOLD YOUR BREATH” HERE
BUY / STREAM “WHEN YOU HOLD YOUR BREATH” HERE
Photo Credit : Kassandra Melnyk // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Everyone knows they need to change. It takes loving someone to make that knowledge unbearable. "When You Hold Your Breath", the second single from Canadian singer-songwriter Cameron Reed as Father Of The Year.
For a project this unguarded, Reed arrives with unlikely background credentials. Previously known as Babe Rainbow, a Warp Records-signed electronic project whose work Pitchfork described as "overcast, suffocating sonic landscapes," Reed pivots with Father Of The Year into altogether more personal territory. The singer-songwriter tradition has always made room for men who fall short. It hasn't often had to accommodate a generation of men who have the language to understand themselves completely and nothing to show for it.
Where Father Of The Year’s first single, “The Fixer”, introduced the central character at his most fortified, "When You Hold Your Breath" finds him at his most open. The arrangement, conceived by producer and multi-instrumentalist Christopher Vincent, carries the same warmth of organ, brass and strings, the same loose mid-tempo groove, but the emotional register has shifted. This is not a man fixing problems nobody asked him to solve. This is a man learning to listen.
LISTEN / SHARE “WHEN YOU HOLD YOUR BREATH” HERE
BUY / STREAM “WHEN YOU HOLD YOUR BREATH” HERE
The song turns on a private language two people build in the silence between words. ‘When you hold your breath, I hear every word unspoken / When you're lost in thought, I'll never know where you go.’ He can feel everything she isn't saying. He will never fully reach her. In a crisis just one look will hold us together / When I see you exhale then I know you found your way home.’
While “The FIxer” highlighted a man who couldn't stop talking, he learned that the things left unsaid are the ones still in our command. It is not a comfortable admission for someone like him. "I'm not a humble man" he concedes, before the song opens into something larger, love not as a problem to be solved but as a defiance of everything that would diminish it. ‘In defiance, we'll sing as Death comes to take us / 'Cause our love assures we'll be heard through the Great Unknown.’
LISTEN / SHARE “THE FIXER” HERE
BUY / STREAM “THE FIXER” HERE
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