Will Pope - “Rigmarole”
Photo by Stevexoh
It’s been a few months since we’ve heard from London-based Will Pope, but he’s back today with his fantastic brand of folk music, revealing the new single, “Rigmarole.”
If you’ve never before graced your ears with the music of Pope, you are in for a truly delectable musical dish. “Rigmarole” begins with what we believe to be some studio chatter before breaking into the most exquisite guitar plucking we’ve ever heard. Pope has long declared his fondness for Chet Atkins’ guitar work, so if you like what you hear, you can most assuredly thank Chet for that.
Around the thirty second mark, our ears are greeted with what we’ve waited half a year to once again experience– Pope’s phenomenal vocal. He has been blessed with a very wonderful gift and has chosen to share it with the world through his music. If you have an affinity to early Bon Iver or Jeff Buckley, pressing play on “Rigmarole” will breathe new life into your lungs. We cannot help but lose ourselves and all of our troubles within Pope’s extraordinary falsetto.
Around the track’s midpoint, the arrangement makes room for an amiably reverberated lead guitar. And though the song is sparingly populated, the production leaves listeners with the sense that it is much larger than life itself. “Rigmarole” is the perfect soundtrack for your moments of introspection and goes quite wonderfully on these dark and quiet mornings that will inevitably lead into another winter.
About the track, Pope adds: “This is a song about how our lives are just stories we tell ourselves edited so we can create order and help us find meaning. So much of our lives is lost to memory. Who we think we are/were and how people see us now and in the past is never clear. In many ways our lives can feel like long, rambling stories without meaning standing in stark contrast to the narrativised, simplified stories we create about ourselves on social media or engage with in any media landscape. I imagine the narrator of this song scrolling through reels of old photos barely recognising the places and people they were tagged with, until eventually they see their object of desire who they remember fondly bemoaning the dull humdrum consuming their present life.”
-HD