We warmed to Jim Jagger immediately. Not just because of his charming folk song that we’ve had in our ears today, but also because he looks to be an artist who is working hard on helping up and coming musicians (under the label, Music Wrapped), especially in their songwriting careers, and we applaud that.
Memories of Spring is Jagger’s latest single and it is a song written for someone who has everything going for them, but lacks confidence in themselves. It’s a song about holding on and weathering the storm.
Memories of Spring starts with a lovely acoustic guitar and when Jagger’s voice comes in, the whole song takes on a real modern English folk feel. Occasional electric guitars in the very distant background help to fill the sound.
As the song develops, layered vocals are added, with some absolutely lush harmonies, and some droned notes on strings (with great stereo in the strings track) join the soundscape.
There’s some beautiful rise and fall in this gentle folk styled track, and we particularly loved the build on the repeated phrase “Hold On”. It just keeps on building, with more and more instrumentation and more powerful vocals and harmonies before dropping right back to the end, finishing as it started on just guitar and lead vocals.
A perfect length for radio, Memories of Spring should be pitched to BBC Cambridge and local and hospital radio. Folk orientated internet stations will love this track too.
From a production perspective, there’s a few peaking frequencies in the track that could be notched out; in particular, the G on the acoustic guitar (196Hz) is a little dominant to our ears.
Overall the track is quite a mono sound, apart from the strings. The guitar and vocals would benefit, we feel, from a little more stereo and stereo effects. Perhaps also a boost of the top 3 octaves with a notch out around 6-7kHz to avoid adding too much character to the strums of the acoustic guitar. We have a few other suggestions to take this track from superb to world class, but for the purposes of this review, we’ve mentioned just a couple.
Memories of Spring is a well written and gentle folk song which warms the soul. With lush harmonies and characterful lead vocals, this song is sure to win the hearts of many singer-songwriter folk fans.