Joe Pope is a singer-songwriter/ Americana artist from Atlanta who is releasing his latest song, Scenery today (April 1, 2022).
Scenery is a song about discovering a partner’s infidelity – “there’s a watch on the bedside table”, but there’s something about the calmness in Pope’s voice that gives you the impression that he’s come to terms with the situation and is moving on with his life. The last line of the song is clever – “My point of view? What’s the point of you?” We just love these kinds of plays on words.
Pope’s vocals are expertly delivered and with such a warm and creamy depth to them that its hard to imagine that this is a song about going from a “we” to a “me”. There’s a resignation as if all of the fighting is just done with and now the vocalist is coming to terms with their new role in life.
The song starts with some gorgeously warm and well recorded acoustic guitar. Bass and piano join to fill the space, as do a few lovely touches on the snare rim before the full drum kit comes in.
The piano, guitar riffs and violin riffs are all very gentle and all help conjure up that feeling of coming to terms with the situation at hand. The guitar and violin riffs are panned nicely, with the violin playing some beautiful evocative notes in particular that at times sounded just a little celtic.
The kick drum sits nicely in the track and is suitably thumpy and punchy, together with some very graceful long held notes on the cello (one of our favourite instruments for this style of music – it just adds so much).
From a production point of view, this is a well recorded song. We felt there were a few dominating peaks in the backing track in the low mids (200,400,600Hz) that we’d suggest notching out. The acoustic guitar also appears to have a dominating resonance at 164Hz, most noticeable in the intro before the other instruments are added. There’s something about the reverb that’s been chosen for the vocal track which is just adding a little mud to the mix. We’d suggest trying a hall reverb or something much brighter. On that note we’d also recommend trying a shelf boost of the top 3 octaves to add some brightness into the overall track (especially the drums and vocals) with a slight dip around 9kHz to avoid too much sibilance in the vocal track.
Joe Pope’s, Scenery, is a beautiful, bittersweet and heartfelt americana style song of acceptance. At under 3 minutes its a pretty short song, but it says absolutely everything it needs to say in a very radio friendly and enjoyable way. We’re looking forward to hearing more from this great Georgia (US) artist.