Tag: loyle carner

Day 60: Loose Ends by Loyle Carner ft. Jorja Smith

I really, REALLY wanted to not do this song. I’ve recently featured both of these artists individually, but when I heard it I had no choice. It is simply gorgeous.

Loyle Carner’s follow up to Ottolenghi (go back through the blog if you missed it) is called Loose Ends and is reflective and introspective about the state of his relationships past and present and how he wishes his current circle was there for him through previous struggles, most notably his father’s death. It was featured yesterday on Annie Mac’s Radio 1 show, Future Sounds, as her Hottest Record In The World and rightfully so.

During that interview, he talked about how he wrote it with New Zealander and frequent collaborator Jordan Rakei in the same session that Ottolenghi was written. It was actually Rakei’s decision to not jump on the song himself and allow Carner to collaborate with other artists and explore vocal compliments to his own, and boy has he found one in Jorja Smith.

They have been friends for a long time but never worked together, and it was worth the wait. The track is quite clearly a collaborative effort. It was developed with Jorja and Loyle Carner in the same room, tweaking lyrics and inflections to create a new template for singing and rapping hybrids. Jorja Smith is not an accessory to a Loyle Carner song, she is an organ within it, a functioning piece of the track as it ebbs and flows, and we can literally hear her contributions as Loyle Carner raps about his life.

Jordan Rakei produced this wonderfully, and if you are planning on looking out of a window forlornly, longing for sunshine back as it drizzles and rains into March then get this song playing. Not to rub it in, but I am off to hop on a plane to St. Lucia for a week now. Blog posts will still be coming, so look forward to another week of amazing tunes as we ease our way towards the end of the first quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of A Song A Day.

 

Spotify Playlist Link: https://spoti.fi/2CKuVex

Day 55: Ottolenghi by Loyle Carner ft. Jordan Rakei

There is a trend amongst rappers nowadays to namecheck basketball players in their bars. Recently, on his feature on 21 Savage’s a lot, J Cole mentioned New York Knicks and Orlando Magic point guards Denis Smith Jr.and Markelle Fultz respectively. 2009’s star-studded Forever was done in honour of Lebron James, and at the start of this blog, we featured Sheck Wes’ breakout hit, Mo Bamba (another Orlando star, this time a centre).

Loyle Carner opted for a different approach. Following his critically acclaimed debut album Yesterday’s Gone in 2017, Ottolenghi is named after Israeli-British chef, Yotam Ottolenghi. A bit different to a sports star! This was Carner’s first release since his album, and the honouring of the chef is fitting, considering the charity work he does. He runs cooking schools, primarily for children and teenagers with ADHD, to help them to cook and cope with their disability. It’s an issue close to his heart, having grown up with the condition also, and his school is brilliantly named Chilli Con Carner.

It’s based off an experience Loyle Carner had on a train, where he was reading the chef’s cookbook, Jerusalem, and was asked by a fellow passenger about his “Bible book”. He cites it in the song, singing “they ask about the bible I was reading/Told them that the title was misleading labelled it Jerusalem but/really it’s for cooking Middle Eastern” and he has employed New Zealander Jordan Rakei to supplement his gritty, hip-hop-washed singing voice.

The gentle combination of piano and synths becomes slightly more energetic with an assortment of drums, but the pairs delicate voices combine beautifully to create a frollicking track that breezes through a lazy summer evening. Loyle Carner’s intelligent lyricism and eloquent rapping are becoming notorious within the British hip-hop scene; a thriving community outside of the now global grime scene. Rakei is cut from the same cloth as Carner, producing effortlessly chilled out, hip-hop inspired music. The combination is as expected; a cleverly produced, mellow song that was well worth the 18-month wait Loyle Carner fans had before he released new solo music.

 

Spotify Playlist Link: https://spoti.fi/2CKuVex