A beautifully serene love ballad.
Elbow have always been a band of romantics. On nearly every one of their albums, you can find a gorgeous dedication to a love between couples, friends or just humanity in general. In this case, the “Six Words” of their latest single are “I’m falling in love with you,” sung peacefully by Guy Garvey as a keyboard melody dances on the air. Once the rest of the band kicks in, the song keeps its sense of wonder but with a bit more gravity to balance out the floating keys. With a choir of voices to close the tune out, it’s one of Elbow’s strongest odes yet.
As Garvey said about the track, “It draws heavily on my teenage years: the bottle green in the song is the colour of my school uniform and the six lanes is the traffic on the road to school in Prestwich. Though that six lanes line was something I originally wrote back in the early elbow days when I sat in The Cornerhouse people watching so it’s a double reminisce and a return to my love of writing about love.”
“Six Words” will appear on Flying Dream 1, out on Nov. 19.