“Play the music, give it to the people / Don’t you know you’re doing fine? / Sing the chorus, never mind the verses / You know you are a friend of mine,” croons Rob Alexander, his words echoing the emotion in his band’s play with a powerful vocal thrust to the rhythm of “Friend of Mine (Elton’s Epic),” the second single from his album Being Myself. Alexander has a way with words – most of us know this by now – but in “Friend of Mine (Elton’s Epic),” he makes it awfully hard for even the stingiest of critics to deny his place in today’s hierarchy of indie singers.
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This single isn’t just about displaying the charming lyricism Alexander has built his entire music career around – far from it, truth be told. There’s a lot to the instrumental fabric of “Friend of Mine (Elton’s Epic),” and it all starts with the bedrock piano melodies that provide a gateway to the track in its opening moments. Everything is structured off of the harmonies it would, and ultimately does, forge with the adjacent lead vocal, and through so bittersweet guitar theatrics towards the end of the song, all of the loose-ends wind up being tied together in a perfect ribbon of rhythm and rhyme.
I HEART RADIO: https://www.iheart.com/artist/rob-alexander-31993955/songs/friend-of-mine-eltons-epic-82899098/?autoplay=true
The vocal harmonies in “Friend of Mine (Elton’s Epic)” are some of the smoothest I’ve heard in a Rob Alexander single, and that’s no small statement to make when we take a look at just how profound some of his past cuts have been. Long Road Coming Home, his breakthrough album, was a singer’s smorgasbord of color, texture and tone broken into chapter-like songs, but in Being Myself, tracks like this one feel like epics in their own right, compiled together in a collection of stories and poems that could be arranged any which way and still sound incredibly moving.
I found the beat in this song to be remarkably strong from the jump, but I like that it’s never intrusive on the vocal or any of the other instrumental components in the track. There was clearly a lot of work put into the construction of this piece, and most – if not all – of it took place on the artist’s side of the glass. The mix is beefy but definitely nothing I would deem overly physical, and even in its most vulnerable of moments, the sonic depth of this single is coming from the harmony and almost never from the soundboard.
APPLE MUSIC: https://music.apple.com/gb/album/being-myself/1485176301
If Rob Alexander can keep what he’s got on deck rolling into 2020, he’s going to see even more exposure and success going beyond the underground he’s become so dominant in, and I doubt I’m the only observer noting as much this January. He’s got all the right framework to capture some of the spotlight away from his mainstream contemporaries who have by and large abandoned the tradition pop vocal-model, and with a song like “Friend of Mine (Elton’s Epic)” out now to start the year off right, few will be able to debate his eagerness to reach a wider audience.
Levi Colston