As collaborations such as “Lovely Love” have already shown, the coming together of songwriter and arranger Lisa Benedetto and singer/musicians Willow Layne and E.G. “Eddie” Holmes has been a musically fruitful arrangement. So why break up a winning formula?
Knowing that they are surely on to a good thing here, the three return with “I Can’t Miss You Anymore,” a soulful country ballad that drills down into the sort of subject that country music does better than any other genre – heartbreak!
As the title suggests, it takes as its subject that feeling where the heartache of someone’s absence in your life seems to weigh down every waking hour. Sleep, if you can find it, offers some relief, but the daytime sees you carrying around a burden that makes life feel impossible. It’s a feeling that pulls you back into the past, stops you moving forward with your life until you conclude that you have to stop, that you can miss them anymore.
Bendetto’s arrangements are perfect – a distant, brushed beat and feint guitars, and an emotive atmosphere woven from a gently soaring pedal guitar and a softly sweeping violin. On top of this lush soundscape, the twin voices work their magic: Holmes sounding vulnerable and broken, the catch in his delivery palpable; Layne soft and sympathetic, the two together making for opposites that attract perfectly.
But the real magic is how these two voices deliver a song that, on the surface at least, is the sound of someone unable to cope with the weight of such a longing, but which, when you re-consider their words, you see that it is actually a song of defiance. I will get through this, their voices say, no matter how hard this is, I will move on, I will stop letting this define me, I will live my life again.
Not only a gorgeous song but a spirited sentiment.
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