Bertie Newman - “Razored Glass”
Hackney born-and-raised singer-songwriter Bertie Newman has just released the raw and folksy sounds of “Razored Glass,” a track that delves into the despair of losing someone to suicide.
It is not at all uncommon for us to be drawn toward the darkness, as more than half the songs that we feature are about grief or loss; however, you do not need to be completely familiar with this agony in order to enjoy the hell out of Newman’s new song.
Newman gets things started with a delicately sparse arrangement, consisting of only acoustic guitar and vocal, with a bit of an ambient pad running through the track’s underbelly. The lyrics do not hold anything back and are quite obviously drawn from something deeply personal, though we always do our best not to dig too deeply.
The distant and ethereal cries of a pedal steel emerge, and if you’re at all familiar with the reviews that we write, you’ll know that there is little else on this planet that brings a song home better than this glorious sound. Then, of course, Newman has also included a magnificent vocal harmony, one of our other prerequisites for indie folk.
And if that is not enough to sell you on the song, the chorus will finish the job. This magnificent beast of a refrain raises to a heavenly level of sound as Newman brings the power of his upper register. Backing vocals line the outer edges of the arrangement, with wondrous glimpses from the banjo and fiddle, lending a profound width to “Razored Glass.”
About the track, Newman adds: “Razored Glass explores the initial feelings of grief. When losing someone to suicide you feel as if you haven’t been good enough and this is the main premise of the song. The way in which that feeling is explored is by telling the story of the last time I saw that person alive. It talks about how that persons perspective must’ve been so much darker than your own. How you might’ve felt you were having the best time but actually the opposite is true.”
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-HD