Change is inevitable but it is not always for the better, at least that is what you hear people moaning about as they get older. Thankfully, Eli Tidmore proves that even something as iconic as the love song can be updated to represent the technological age without losing the magic and majesty that such a sentiment needs to be built on.
The song wanders the pop-rock divide, pulling at infectious threads from one side and adding enough power chord crunches from the other to take things into some brilliantly playful and dynamic realms. The result is a mature but accessible song built on sharp beats and a groovesome drive, a sweet yet wonderfully understated chorus and more hooks than a Peter Pan convention. All of which are classic song writing building blocks perhaps but the real up date is to be found in the lyrics.
Like it or loathe it today’s world is mobile, instantaneous and on-line and so a “will they/won’t they” love story centred on modern communication is only to expected, art reflects life after all. But where as a lesser artist could make this cliché or forced, Eli’s charm is that whilst the focus is the clinical world of the phone message, the sentiment is timeless. Those tentative steps into a new relationship, that reservation, those doubts…the feelings people have been grappling with since we first climbed down from the trees and invented language with the sole purpose of asking each other out for a drink.
The world turns and whilst the trappings of life change, the way that the head and heart operate doesn’t and what Heart in My Phone really shows is that as much things change on some levels, they pretty much stay the same. Somewhere in the distant future out there in the vastness of space people may develop psychic communication over millions of miles but those young kids will still be getting the same flutters in their hearts as they wait for that all important reply.
