Toronto native Deanna Petcoff writes ‘happy songs about sad things’ and new single ‘Stage Lights’ captures this perfectly.
Opening with a Kim Deal-esque bass line, Deanna starts to look back on a night where she felt a spark with a touring musician and asks ‘What if?’ She wonders what might have been if instead of almost enjoying a night of passion, she had decided to pursue something with this alluring nomad: ‘Is your arm still broken from the night we climbed the heights I thought we’d never reach? Is your heart still aching from that brush of hope I injected from the depths of me?’
There are stirring blasts of guitar within the first 40 seconds before the music bursts into something resembling a jam session between Lucy Dacus, Tom Petty and Patti Smith. She starts to offer observations on how this handsome stranger would settle into a relationship with a fellow touring creative and quickly realises it wouldn’t work, repeating the words ‘I am left alone now’ with an air of sadness and discussing phone calls in the middle of the night solely because he’s stuck in LA… Deanna ponders if they could ever really connect when they’d phsyically be so far apart.
