It is remarkable how out of touch you can get with home grown musicians when you are listening frequently to foreign ones.
When I first saw the PR about Georgie I confused her with the White Stripe-alike Georgia, who I saw perform live at Iceland Airwaves last time out. Our Georgie is the Mansfield-born singer-songwriter who has built up a reputation supporting the likes of Jake Bugg, Blossoms, Tom Walker, Jack Savoretti and The Lighthouse Family and who was the first signing to Bugg’s Soul Kitchen Recordings.
I like the line in the PR, “she comes from Mansfield but her heart is in the Laurel Canyon.” Anyone who invokes the (relatively harmless) 1960s L.A. counter-culture capital, home at one time or another to Joni Mitchell; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; Linda Ronstadt; Frank Zappa; Jim Morrison; the Mamas and the Papas; Carole King; the Eagles, and many more is okay in my book before I even put the headphones on.
The track is taken from her debut album ‘At Home’, which has received its official physical release this January.
Like much of the album, ‘Simple Things’ was written at the beginning of the first UK nationwide lockdown. Oh what a distant, almost pleasant summery memory that now is. Here she searches for silver linings in dark(er) times and learns to love life’s less-complicated aspects, like watching TV. Well, if you like repeats, Georgie, it’s your birthday, Every Groundhog day.
In that vein there’s a clever opening line, “Stay up all night, we’ve got one more season” followed by “take off for a walk, explore with no reason”. Just about everyone can relate to that, what has become the story of most peoples’ lives this last year.
The arrangement to the piano melody is simple but a whistling wind effect and single repeating synth pad note draw you in as if you were parked around the fireside with her. The album was released digitally in the summer but someone has been savvy enough to realise this is a winter song, appropriate to our winter of discontent.
She has quite an interesting voice as well, on which (to my untrained ear) she seems to hover and vary somewhere between mezzo-soprano and contralto and which is even slightly reminiscent of Britney Spears at times.
Definitely one of the better pandemic songs. But let’s hope there aren’t too many more of them, period.
Available now on CD and digitally, ‘At Home’ can also be purchased as a special bonus bundle, which includes a signed copy of Georgie’s previous release ‘Georgie: Live!’.