Night Beds offer this weeks free song Ramona, from the kind-of-ish-not a band that is Winston Yellen and a few other musicians. Hailing from Nashville, Tennessee you can hear the country influences as the track starts, but don’t let that you put you off, this track has a very chilled folky vibe to it. It’s much more preferable to last weeks car crash of a song that personally left me with a headache and wanting to throw my computer out the window.
Winston Yellen is probably one of those great examples of why studying music doesn’t necessarily make you a great musician. He took himself off to college, flunked and dropped out, and here I am writing about his great music with a first class bachelor of music and the inability to write anything good. Music is something you’re good at regardless of the pieces of paper that say otherwise.
Ramona opens with a classic Nashville slide guitar that makes you fell all gooey inside. The track launches into a warm rhythmic verse before suddenly dropping to just vocals for a bridge/chorus effect, then gradually builds back up to the full band texture and carries us back to Ramona in the lyrics for the second verse.
This pattern repeats itself but the second build up adds lush, squidgey, silky vocal harmonies building again before dropping down for the last quarter of the track into an atmospheric bed of higher pitched vocals and string arrangement with light brushwork from the drummer on the cymbals.
It’s so difficult to describe this overall track without using words like squidgey and making awful bed puns. The sounds just envelopes you, and in the quiet parts you’re drawn into an intimate space with Winston’s voice that it almost feels like he’s standing just behind you whispering sweet nothings in your ear. If this song was a shy guy trying to woo me on a first date, it’d win every time. So Winston if you’re ever in London and at a loose end, drop me an email!
Night Beds for me has awakened the need to listen to the likes of Ryan Adams, Ben Kweller, Ray Lamontagne and Ben Harper. Chilled out acoustic folk tracks that fit perfectly with my teenage self and her love of The OC and One Tree Hill.
So this weeks verdict is download right away, don’t even think about, go have that love affair with an artist in your head. It’ll be worth it, trust me… I’ve given in already.
-TWSH
Download Ramona and Night Beds album Country Sleep
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