Wish I Couldn’t Feel A Thing is the absorbing new single from Belfast singer-songwriter Gareth Dunlop. The accompanying video was recorded live in Belfast’s historic Titanic Pump House, which is simply perfect for the lush vocal layers and harmonies at the heart of the song. The instrumentation is light and sparse, just a touch of delicate acoustic guitar and banjo, which allows us to focus on the glorious singing. Dunlop’s voice, swelled by fine backing, fills the space beautifully. Resonant and ranging, his vocal is heavenly and winds along a gorgeous melodic path. Dunlop’s emotive performance is matched by his poetic words of lost love: “Though I know that sorrow // Is love’s souvenir A bitter memento // That says that love was here // Though I know that love’s worth the suffering // Sometimes I wish, that I couldn’t feel a thing // Wish I couldn’t feel a thing.” His lyrics explore the natural conflict that emerges when we need love but want to escape the emotional pain and grief it can bring. Dunlop explains: “There’s no softening what this song is about. We’ve all had moments in life when we wish we couldn’t feel a thing. I know I’ve had more than a few. Putting the song together in the studio was kind of challenging. We wanted to capture the raw emotion of the song while still adding new textures and ornamentations that wouldn’t distract from the lyric. We sweated over every part that went down against the vocal until we all agreed that nothing was taking away from the song.”
The band’s voices rising up in the Pump House’s extraordinary space for the video makes the song even more sonically-special. Dunlop says of recording the video: “Getting the chance to go down into the belly of the historic Titanic Pump House in Belfast with the band to record a live version was a moment I won’t forget. It’s a cavernous space with so much history. The echoes of our voices bouncing around felt like there were 50 of us singing and not just five.”
Dunlop’s music takes us on deeply reflective journeys through loss, heartbreak and memory and his most recent album, Welcome to The House of I Don’t Know, explores the mark left on us by those closest to us. Beyond his own songs, Dunlop produced Foy Vance’s album Sign of Life and has written many songs for others, including Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, and John Oates. His own songs have been used in many television series and films, such as Lucifer, Nashville, This Is Us, Suits, Marshals, Tulsa King, Found, and Safe Haven. Enjoy.
