Standard Folk Rock
Boulding's single "Copenhagen" from her forthcoming album The Red Dress is pretty standard fare folk rock. I like the use of slide guitar, but the piece itself feels a little too produced. I can't feel any of the emotion necessary for a lost/losing love song like this where the catch phrase is "it's not too late for Copenhagen, it's not too late this time, it's not too late we're close to heaven, you'll hold me again". Lyrics like this might grab someone if there weren't a studio synth-symphony roaring alongside her voice. As is, it feels like Disney without the cartoon stories.
I like the fact that there is a story referred to in this song and that it is never fully elucidated: something could/will/did happen in Copenhagen, and she's trying to recapture it. However, the piece's mainstream tendencies overshadow the value of the story she's trying to tell. Her lyrics are still too broad: all the characters in the song stay as vagaries (and thus apply to everyone and can sell to everyone yeccchhh), and all the imagery is place-less; Copenhagen is mentioned, but everything else is about 'stars flying by' and her efforts to 'reach you'. Reaching who? What stars?
I repeat this criticism a lot, but it's a necessary repetition: if you do not specify things in your songs, then you're just making music that is a symbol of the capitalist sales industry. Does this make sense? I know it makes cents and pence, but what about sense? My theory is this: if your music is about nameless/faceless people and places, then it isn't yours. You have no ownership of it because it expresses the exact same sentiment as every other piece of music on the planet. It's like a product from a factory. Multi-purpose. Broken heart? Copenhagen. Hopeful? Copenhagen. In love? Copenhagen. Lonely? Copenhagen. No thanks. Not even Charles Dickens tried to be as accessible as modern pop stars. Criminy!
The people selling your music want you to speak as broadly as possible, because then your music is as accessible as possible and sells more. Why would you want to do that though? Music like this just fills space in a place where Helen Boulding should be, not *young woman* and *young man* and *impossible love*. Right?
You're almost there, Helen. You've done better than the majority of pop singers on the planet, because you mention a specific city in Denmark. Talk about Denmark. Talk about Copenhagen as a specific place and what you like about it, not about Copenhagen as a space that fills four beats in your song and rhymes with "heaven". Talk about having a bad cup of coffee in a Danish cafe and how you and your lover were happy there for a while and your faces were shining with wry laughter about how bad that cup of coffee was and how you both knew you would end up as friends. That experience is yours. Respect us enough to let us try and find meaning in our own experiences by listening to yours. Please, it's not too late for "Copenhagen".