&Tilly and BlauDisS team up again for “right//left.” A dreamlike, hazy background drone serves as almost an emotional canvas but one more reactive and dynamic upon which the vocals sing a tale of desolation and melancholic yearning set to a downtempo beat and minimal piano melody. The song was written from the perspective of the daughter of Sarah “Sally” Hemmings, Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved lover. The song seems to reveal a person who can see the future of echoes of the more radical rhetoric of the day, but words those living in the then present who write and speak them lack the will and power to see them realized in the literal phrasing. The line “Won’t get free/A hundred years/Fulfills these dreams” is poetic and quietly powerful in framing a deferred liberation and at least a slightly better world. In the music video we see our singer wandering sideways and backwards in lonely, tiled halls looking dejected and distressed. Is it a commentary on how in some ways in many places our own modern history of civil rights has taken some steps back in so many places and using imagining the hopes of someone who might never live to see the freedom that seems so obvious and logical as a lens through which to examine the present? Possibly but the song itself can be appreciated as a gorgeously immersive song that soothes the mind while not dismissing one’s concerns with performative bravado. Watch the video for “right//left” on YouTube and follow &Tilly at the links below.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
You must be logged in to post a comment.