After picking up the best song award from the Cannes World Film Festival in 2023 and picking up more awards for his music and accompanying music videos from The London Independent Film Awards and The Independent Shorts Awards, the critically acclaimed and endlessly accoladed UK singer-songwriter Peter Beatty has unanchored his nautically meta single, Tell Me Where To Go.
With layered vocal harmonies as magnetically compelling as Jack Johnson’s and Richard Hawley’s atop honeyed and intricate acoustic instrumentation, listening to the organically resolving orchestration will set your imagination alight, awaken even the most dormant of wanderlust proclivities, and unequivocally convince you that in this generation of singer-songwriters, few can infuse their elysian soundscapes with a paralleled shot of alchemy.
I couldn’t think of a more stunning way of attesting to the fact that life is little more than a collection of explorations, whether that’s inwards, towards another, or into territories that will show us pieces of ourselves we never knew existed. Great songs stir emotions; superlative ones have what it takes to reconceptualise your take on existence in a few lyrical lines. Beatty is definitively in the latter camp. Someone exhume and tell Sartre I’ve just found the cure for existentialism.
Tell Me Where To Go hit the airwaves on September 29; stream it on Spotify.
Review by Amelia Vandergast
