In our ears today at the Send Me Your Ears studio, we’ve been taking a listen to the dulcet tones of Jesabel with her latest single, This Small Town.
Hailing from a small town in Georgia (US), Jesabel’s latest release is a song that anyone who grew up in a small town can relate to. It’s about that feeling of being desperate to leave, and trying to figure out who you are before leaving to find yourself, only to be desperate to return.
We absolutely loved the writing of the biography that went with this song. It’s not all that often that we receive a one line header that absolutely nails, but Jesabel’s stood out like that elusive needle in a haystack. She describes her music as “mashing up front porch storytelling with electronic pop-folk instrumentation”. Yes!! That’s it. That’s absolutely it!
The song starts with a gentle church bell tolling, and the accompanying video immediately puts you in that small town mentality. A beautifully recorded and stereo acoustic guitar fills your ears before Jesabel’s smooth country style vocals join the mix.
The song develops well with the addition of some electronic pad sounds, then a kick drum, before the full band sound joins the ensemble.
The chorus of this song is super-catchy. You can imagine anyone across North America singing this around the campfire and believing it’s about their own small town. This song is bigger than campfire music though, this is a perfect radio length track which we feel would be received well by college radio across the US, internet Country and Americana stations and possibly commercial country/folk stations with the right pitch behind it. This really is a beautiful Americana track which is just raised a little out of the ordinary by the addition of more modern instrumentation.
A very well produced track, our suggestions would be to high pass at 40Hz; there’s a lot of information being received in these frequencies that most hi-fi simply can’t handle. Removing it will leave a lot more headroom for the track to shine. Perhaps also a boost of the top 3 octaves, with a dip out at around 3kHz to balance the track a little more, give it more brightness and bring out the sound of the snare wires as the snare sounds to be tuned quite low. These are small suggestions just to our ears, and overall the track is very well produced.
This Small Town is a familiar feeling track with a modern twist. It will appeal to anyone who has experienced small town America, and will hit home with many listeners who enjoy that front porch feeling.