I’ve never really had a hometown, as such. My family moved around a lot when I was a kid, different towns in different countries, so I don’t have a hugely fond connection with any one city or village or whatever – Ana Silvera, I suspect, does. Her songs are infused with London, and in her debut single ‘Hometown’ the memories that linger there are the subject of wistful nostalgia, the kind that comes with retrospect after leaving home to travel the world.
Silvera is a London-born, Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter who has been performing since she was a child. Her voice is eerily similar to that of Regina Spektor (coincidentally, another Brooklynite), but where that Russian quirkstress may pepper her songs with weird guttural stops, hissing, mumbles and burbling, Ana is much happier relying on her remarkable and charming voice. It’s the kind of voice that only comes from being absolutely bloody determined to sound lovely (and it helps that she’s been singing with the English National Opera since she was extremely young), or exactly the voice I would expect from somebody who professes that her, “adolescent semi-rebellion,” phase came when she dared to add some jazz standards to her singing repertoire. Her vocals are accomplished and beautiful.
‘Hometown’ itself is a piano ballad, relatively short, but succinct in conjuring a mood of remembrance. “My soul runs in the waters/Runs in the waters around my hometown,” she sings, but the clue to the meaning behind this comes in the video (directed by Ryan Foregger) – ignore the chap in the toy factory for now (presumably some kind of metaphor for loss of innocence), focus on where Ana is. She’s floating, she’s asleep, she may be dead – she is gone, effectively, from the place that once held her, and now constitutes nothing more than a memory. The key’s in the last line – she doesn’t need, “those tears and those veils and those bells,” any more, she’s gone, she’s moved on. The singer-songwriter’s composition, piano-led and accompanied by a string section, is a fragile and delicate charm. Everyone, even those of us without hometowns, have those places where those memories can feel as much a part of the place as the paving slabs underfoot and the bricks and mortar of the walls.
Tags:
ana silvera, brooklyn, hometown, london, opera, piano, review, Singer Songwriter, single, strings
