We might not all see it, but it doesn’t really need to be any more than Tim Compagna’s ‘New Day’. A cheerful song, well put together, makes you feel nice, makes you move, and makes you think, while being musical enough to be engaging and novel. Music is greatly subjective, but ‘New Day’ can be a reliable template for what a good song should be.
Appropriately Canadian, based in Vancouver, Tim Compagna is a singer and a songwriter whose soulful yelps capture a certain affinity towards Britpop on his newest single ‘New Day’. Acknowledging the difficulty of our modern lives, Compagna is asking us to leave it all behind and embrace a new day with fresh hope. The blissfully naive gesture is mirrored with a gleeful composition featuring 3 major chords that blend rock with pop with country in a familiar sound that’s welcoming and warm.
Even the timbre of the guitar used for rhythm is bright and roomy, almost ukulele-sounding, optimistic in its own way. And the banjo line, hidden in the background, firmly sets in the country influence. The arrangement gently heaves from start to finish, carrying the familiar chords, gracefully adding to them searing strings, then adding a jangly beat with overdriven electric guitar stabs. The build-up is greatly gratifying and is executed with great attention, it managed to renew my attention with each new loop of the song’s lengthy core section.
Cheerful, uplifting, but never oblivious or dishonest, Tim Compagna knows very well how hard it would be to do what he’s telling us to do, but he’s trying nonetheless to get us to see the bright side, no matter how little it is. ‘New Day’ is a deeply pretty and organic song that I greatly appreciated.
