Wow… Joelle Charan was a new name to us until today, but here single, Stained Glass, (out today 8 April 2022) has seriously made us sit up and take notice.
Stained Glass starts with a gorgeous sitar type sound with some very gentle piano chords over the top. Joelle’s voice comes in fairly quickly in the song and it just grabs you immediately. What a beautiful warm, breathy vocal that just melts you! Joelle has fantastic control in her high notes and there’s one moment at around 3 minutes in that the long held note that she performs simply took our breath away. What fantastic diaphragm control! What superb vibrato. Everything about this one note stole the show – as if the rest of the track wasn’t already winning us over!
Stained Glass has simply phenomenal development with exciting use of changes of instrumentation – strings and additional harmonies are a wonderful touch and help to serve the listener with a heart warmingly emotional performance.
We love how there is minimal instrumentation in Stained Glass for about the first minute or so. Charan’s voice carries the song easily and the occasional piano chord and swelling sitar sounds are more than enough to back up her smooth vocals. When the strings come in a little later, the whole song has an orchestral, almost classical feel to it. Really well done.
The stunning vocal sections (we may have mentioned how much we love Charan’s voice!) gave us goosebumps. They are simply euphoric, and with the addition of lots of strings to fill out the sound and just enough percussion to give the song a beat, this really does take you on a wonderful journey.
The subject matter is interesting and unique. Charan speaks of her Hindu and Catholic upbringing; her love of Stained Glass windows and their possible double meaning of being beautiful to observe and yet “stained” and blemished. Fantastic imagery and metaphors too. Everything about this song just oozes class.
Stained Glass is well produced, well performed and well written. For our own thoughts on production, we’d suggest a tiny dip in the vocal track to alleviate some of the plosive sounds of breath hitting the mic. We’d also suggest a tiny dip around 1kHz where there’s just a slight dominating frequency in the vocal track. A tiny boost of the top 2 octaves will bring some extra life and brightness to the overall track, but to our minds, this really is superbly well done and these are just some small suggestions.
Joelle Charan has produced something really magical with Stained Glass. Its a wonderful genre crossing song and a subject that is so unique as to be very clear that it is written from the heart. We loved it! More please!