Guy Garvey
It started with an email ... "Hello, I love you, please can we work together?" ... That is what Guy Garvey is said to have written, cold, to Jolie Holland, a singer from Texas he had never met and had called one of his favourite songwriters ... She said yes ... They wrote this in a side room, together, and it is a song about loving someone across an ocean, which she knew about at the time from her own life ...
Garvey is the singer in Elbow, the Manchester band, and Courting the Squall, from the end of October 2015, was the first record he made without them ... He used it to do the things five people in a band cannot agree to do ... one of them was to sing a duet with an American across the Atlantic, in the voice of a late-night lounge singer ...
Electricity is that lounge ... brushed cymbals, a smoky, held-back arrangement, a nod to the jazz rooms of New York in the 1930s, and two voices that were not supposed to be in the same country, let alone the same song ...
The measure of it is the brushes ... drums played with wire brushes instead of sticks, which is how a drummer whispers, under a big Manchester voice that has learned to whisper too ... The distance is the subject and the closeness is the sound ... that's the trick of it ...