Michael Feuerstack is clearly awash in the sea of the soul and sending us back some sobering, stirring thoughts. Showing off a glimpse of his upcoming album Harmonize The Moon, his new single, “I Used To Be A Singer”, strikes a powerful chord of introspection and soul searching. As intellectual as it is emotional, Feuerstack gives goosebumps in this intimate piece of verbose songcraft.
With little else besides a plucked acoustic and his inviting voice, the artist creates a soundscape that feels like a warm dust mote drifting across the darkness of space. Ethereal harmonies and sound samples add a layer of wistfulness to the mix. Both expansive and hyper-focussed, the melange of warmth created by Feuerstack’s delivery plays against the open feeling of both the song and the ideas espoused that create what can only be described as existential beauty. If songs are sung around campfires at the end of the universe, they will sound like this.
The beautifully melancholic lyricism is evident from reading the title alone, which hits even more potently in the opening lines:
“I used to by a singer bumping around in the astral plane. Picking up astral trash to polish it up again.”
The friendly gravel of Feuerstack’s voice lends a powerful ambivalence to his words, especially as he sinks down into his lower register. Detailing scenes and mindsets of navigation, exploration, losing oneself, and the flow of nature and time, “I Used To Be A Singer” seems to express not only the artist’s own reckoning of time and space, but a universal one as well. Yet the well-placed sample of an automated voice and speech at the end of the track wrench us back down to reality, still holding the ideas that were shared.
On this new single, Michael Feuerstack seems to have one eye turned inside and one eye turned out to the nature of existence. Grounded in earthy tones and arrangement, he has expressed something larger than life. With the talent and poetic insight he holds, Feuerstack seems like he may just have it in him to harmonize the moon.