• Drama

Hamish - Singing In My Soul

What does a song remember when the person who wrote it has already lived several different lives? There is something beautifully uncomplicated about Hamish’s Singing In My Soul. Originally released on his 1999 debut Picture In My Bag, the song makes a comeback more than two decades later with very little need to disguise where it came from. It belongs to that older songwriting tradition. The melody carries as much emotional weight as production.  The recording itself seems to preserve that philosophy. Recorded at the partly ruined Hatfield Court in Herefordshire, with Hamish’s guitar and vocals joined by bass, violin and saxophone, it has the looseness of musicians making something together rather than constructing something immaculate. There is warmth in that roughness.  And then there is the central image: having someone “singing” inside your soul. It is an almost old-fashioned way of describing love, but that is precisely why it works. The song treats intimacy as something that settles into you. Someone becomes memory, rhythm, comfort, a presence that continues even when circumstances change. Hamish himself has described the song as something that has come to encompass several relationships in his life, which makes its emotional simplicity feel less naïve and more accumulated. You can hear why the song has endured. Hamish’s influences include Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and Neil Young, and Singing In My Soul shares that belief in the power of a memorable melody and direct songwriting. It makes love’s repetition do the emotional work. Perhaps that is also why the song found a life beyond its original release. It became a folk-chart hit in New Zealand and was later used on television, eventually becoming something Hamish was regularly asked to perform at weddings and other gatherings. In the current context, the song is a good fit for Once (2007). Read More

• 7 min
• 8.9