Single Review: Letting Go

Franklin Davis doesn’t have a pure voice. It’s on the slightly brittle side of melodious, more the kind that would blend in well with others. Hence, perhaps unwittingly, the aptness of his musical moniker Torn Chorus.

His new single Letting Go – he has an extensive back catalogue worth dipping into – is a song for our times. It’s accompanied by a video and background story that opens with lines that might bristle a few feathers – “In the 60’s New Zealand was a far flung colony virtually unknown to the rest of the world.”

That presupposes that the rest of the world was ignorant of the fact New Zealand was the first country in the world to give women the vote, that a Kiwi Ernest Rutherford was the first to split the atom and that another Kiwi, Sir Edmund Hillary, was the first to conquer Mount Everest and that the ANZAC’s, who fought in two world wars, were unheard of.

The video narrative though makes a pertinent point about the New Zealand government’s initiative during that decade to subsidise immigrant fares, which resulted in a “population” boom. Fast forward, and he sets the scene with the rejoinder: “But now Covid has isolated us again.”

As Letting Go unfolds against a steady acoustic guitar and an electric guitar overlay it takes on the appearance of a cautionary tale.

The warning – the impact we have had on the natural world around us: “Now the world is suffering our planet’s deadly blows”. Followed by the consequences of not heeding the warning: “We find ourselves alone again cut off from all we know.”

It’s a narrative though that has a kernel of wisdom revealed in its chorus: “Letting go is nothing new, nothing really there to do. Slowing down our troubled lives, see the beauty that’s inside.”

It reminded me of an insight offered in Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth … “and our civilisation, which is lost in doing, knows nothing of Being. It asks: Being? What do you do with it?”

When we become over-dependent upon external circumstances for our sense of identity and purpose, events such as Covid can turn our worlds upside down and inside out. The purpose of life isn’t an outside job, it’s an inside one.

Torn Chorus is exploring inner space. It’s a place we all probably need to become a lot more comfortable with.