Some songs are about big concepts, grand events, and commonly shared experiences. “To Fall” is a song about something so small, so intimate yet metaphorically earth-shattering. It is based on the idea that sometimes just one word can break the illusion of perfection, and then, having shattered the dream, you have to watch and agonise over the resulting consequences in slow motion, knowing that there is no going back, no saving the situation. Love is often this precious, this precarious.
It is an idea that plays out in the music as well. Initially, the song sits on the edge of silence, more a mood, a feeling, an emotion. Then, as the liquid rhythms and stark beats usher in the vocals, we leave that place of purity and perfection as the real world comes rushing toward us.
The grandeur of the music, the heavenly and otherworldly vocals, and the song’s increasing sonic weight echo that first biblical Fall from grace, when renegade angels were made human and cast out of their state of grace as heaven and earth collided.
It is a beguiling song, odd and other, strange and scintillating, cinematic and seductive. “To Fall” is not just a reminder that perfection is a fragile thing and that love is often maintained by walking the knife-edge, but that the most magical of music can be made through the bringing together of near-nothing, the most delicate of sonics, the deftest of creative processes.
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