There are very few voices in folk and jazz that sound quite as soulful as MARO’s. Her breathy tone will smooth the roughest stones, and calm the anxious with a simple melody. When her voice introduced itself amidst a low four-count bass drum coupled with small, low-maintenance guitar strums, my lips curled gently in a smile. The band and MARO make beautiful harmonies, even when those are just an octave apart. Every moment of this song feels right.

There’s never really a climax, or any major ramp up in tone and energy, but the song does build up in very minimal ways section-per-section. At first, a piano makes its entrance, quickly followed by a reverb-y electric guitar melody, with the kind of twang found in a somber western ballad. The piano especially makes itself more and more prominent as the song comes to a close, with it actually finish off the track with one final chord. The production is wonderfully breathy and full of life, feeling as vivid as a tree in late spring. Like mentioned before, its lack of complexity, both in composition and production, is this song’s greatest strength.

Walk Above the City is the kind of track you’d play around a camp fire, surrounded by the people you cherish the most in this world, singing the song, sharing a human moment of intimacy between the circle. A friend or two who knows the tune might join in on the harmonies as you guide them with your acoustic guitar, and the beautiful moment you all shared is the product that became Walk Above the City. It’s a song that would find home in everyone’s tastes, because while being simple, it’s extremely versatile in its sound, not really being owned by a single genre per se.

Walk Above the City is a song that should be sung for years to come, and one, I hope, will be appreciated by everyone else as much as I did.

Author: Nicholas Gaudet

Music producer and writer from Dieppe, Canada.