The gorgeous landscapes of Southern California and Arizona, including the Cuyamaca Mountains, Palomar Mountain, Mount Lemmon, Mount Laguna and San Diego provide an arresting backdrop and accompaniment to the latest single from Zach Phillips. It’s an artfully shot and edited video, that captures the mood of ‘Curses’ well. The song itself features bright, shimmering guitar, a typically engaging melody and Phillips’ smooth voice. Indeed, his vocal performance on ‘Curses’ is excellent. Lyrically thoughtful and sensitive, he sings intriguing lines like: “My voice is small, but it’s the only song I can’t forget…My voice is soft, but it’s the only song I can sing.”
‘Curses’ is taken from Phillips’ recent album ‘Goddaughters’, which is a superbly written and coherent piece of work. It was written during the pandemic to answer a single question: what would a final album sound like? Phillips explains: “As the songs began coalescing, I noticed that they shared the same threads: legacy, transcendence, being in the moment and I realized, ‘This sounds like a final album. If not my final album, the kind of music someone would leave to the world when making a swan song.’ My intention was to capture music that was both of the moment and slightly outside of time. The ‘goddaughters’ are the songs themselves. We tend to them, and for a finite period, we live with them. But they are not ours. Like us, the songs are just passing through. Again … the material of a final album.” The final result, his fourth full-length release, is an album with a real sense of completeness, a musical journey that blends various styles and genres n a timeless mix. Check it out.
