Go

"I felt that I need to be closer to my audience," she said, explaining why a woman born in Toronto moved to Berlin ... Her audience was in the East — Eastern and Central Europe, the countries where a certain kind of sad, grand, slow song never went out of style ... She had been making that kind of song in a bedroom in Canada under the name Chinawoman, and the East found it before the West did ...

Michelle Gurevich's mother danced with the Kirov ... Her father was an engineer in Leningrad ... She grew up with Russian as her first language and Alla Pugacheva on the record player, and what she took from Soviet pop, she said, was the chord changes, the way of singing, the enormous choruses ... Put that into a bedroom with a synthesizer and an electric guitar and you get Show Me the Face, 2010, the record this song is on ...

Almost everything on the track is her — the voice, the synthesizer, the guitar — with one guest, Pascal Paquette, who steps in for a single electric guitar solo and then steps out again ... One-woman music with one visitor ... It is the sound of somebody who built the whole room herself and left one chair for company ...

[ Go ] is a small word to hang a song on ... It is what you say to someone when staying would be worse, and the song says it slowly, at the tempo of not quite meaning it yet ...