Luke Frees latest single is a song about retaking control over your life, and he wrote it as a way of taking back control over his creative process. As a treatment for his writer’s block, Strings is a soaring, heartfelt ballad that sounds and feels good.
A singer-songwriter from Chicago, Illinois, Luke Frees’s sound is deep and earthy, as he uses those rarer-and-rarer organically-recorded acoustic drums. Having been steadily releasing a single a month since November, Strings is actually the first song he wrote for this project, and he says it was the first song that he managed to write after a long period of writer’s block, giving the song a transparent quality.
Strings is a song about standing up for yourself in a toxic relationship, finally regaining control over your life, and it is a message that will surely resonate with a lot of listeners, but even if the lyrics don’t stir your feelings enough, the music makes sure this happens. The song’s epic mix is dominated by the crisp and grand drum part courtesy of Gary Zucker. The verses are strutting displays of Luke Frees’s reflective, personal lyrics, fantastically arranged along with the instrumentation of the song, and the choruses are expansive, epic affairs, with operatic choirs in the background of the stunning chords that sound dramatic, invigorating, and grand. The guitars sound crisp and delightfully overdriven, with a noisy solo section that’s fantastically written along to its peculiar harmony that reminded me of the cinematic chorus on Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars?’.
‘Strings’ is a stunning piece of heartfelt, soulful alternative pop that clearly carries a lot of weight to its songwriting, lyricism, and even to its arrangement and production. I can only say that Luke’s extensive writer’s block may have been a blessing in disguise because it made him write this beautiful piece of music.
