Moses by Jonathan Emile

Jonathan Emile has been winning the hearts of fans on a worldwide scale for nearly a decade, and with his new release in “Moses,” he gets back to basics in the best way possible. There aren’t any frivolous elements included in the construction of “Moses;” in its music video, the verses come alive through the living child protagonists who give their words an increased emotional meaning, creating a narrative almost independent from the one we would get when listening to the song in its original form. Emile pulls out the stops as a player to make this one count, and thanks to his efforts, he definitely has a lot to be proud of.

URL: https://www.jonathanemile.com/

The guitar is even more essential than the lyrics are to making this single sway in our hearts. Their effect isn’t limited by the presence of Emile’s strong vocal at all; actually, quite the opposite. There’s a lot of uncut fragility being afforded some of the spotlight as the strings and harmonica brush up against each other, and when they’re the only components filling the air amidst a brief break from our leading man, it’s hard for anyone, both expert critic or novice pop fan alike, to ignore the emotion that is being laid out on the table in front of us.

I won’t lie – the video can be a bit aesthetically overwhelming in certain moments in comparison to the single by itself, but this doesn’t mean that it isn’t an absolute stunner nonetheless. The shots are almost oversaturated with color, drawing our vision into corners of the screen and back into the eyes of the actors within seconds. I don’t know how well this would play with casual viewers, but for the indie video connoisseur, it’s an article that would be worth considering again later on in the year for sure.

Production-wise, the mix here has a lot of extra grit in it, but not so much as to taint the main product in “Moses” – the harmonies that Emile and his acoustic guitar conjure up. He’s channeling bits of an old school reggae sound in this track that just can’t be overrun with polish, and he rightly left them in as unedited a form as he could without cutting a demo tape and calling it a professional single. I respect the approach, and more importantly, the motivation that was, at least more likely than not, behind it.

DEEZER: https://www.deezer.com/us/track/805410602?autoplay=true

If “Moses” is giving us a good idea of what’s ahead for Jonathan Emile, I think he’s going to do a lot better in the 2020s with mainstream audiences than he did in the 2010s. He’s not stretching himself too thin here at all – I actually think that he’s taking things at the right speed and broaching creative avenues that will ultimately lead to better development as a songwriter and a singer in the long run. His voice is simply honeysweet in this song, and if you’ve never had the opportunity to listen to his music before now, I would say this is a good way of getting introduced to his style.

Samuel Pratt