Nova Soon — Four Walls & The Sky [Official Lyric Video]

'Four Walls & The Sky' is the second single from the forthcoming EP 'Goodbyetown' by Nova Soon (aka Noah de Grunwald). Written in the wake of the death of Noah's father Nick - and his mother Barbara's illness, which led Noah to care for her for years in the same house where Nick died - the EP weaves a black-and-white seaside purgatory world, haunted by memory, through which the listener must walk to escape back to full-colour life.

‘Four Walls’ is the EP’s final track and most tender moment. A luminous decades-spanning love song, it recounts Noah meeting the love of his life around the same time as losing his father, and all the ways in which that great love and that great loss intertwined. Commencing the night before Nick died, when he saw a photo of Noah’s partner for the first and last time and whispered back ‘she’s beautiful’, the lyrics then flash forward to Nick’s funeral in a stately London church, and then even further, through the future he’d have wanted for his son’s new family.

Musically, the recording is an audibly choked-up vocal first take, coaxed along by fingerpicking and by the warm piano, funereal church organ, and swooping synthscapes added by producer James Smithells. At one crucial juncture, Nick’s singing is even heard, in a posthumous countermelody lifted from one of his own songs; while the final (found) sound is of Nick’s office door shutting, as if in gentle closure.

***

I showed him your photograph
For the first time on that night before he left
With his old and clouded gaze
He drank in your laughing face
With a laboured breath, he told me you were beautiful

Right then, years of enmity dissolved away
I was six again in school clothes in his arms
A French hillside, and the hall
Where he cushioned my first fall
Maybe he knew it’s you I would be falling for

Oh, I know it’s only early days
But I want a life with you
Four walls and the sky with you

…Does that sound okay?

You held me through his funeral
‘Til I went alone to say my last goodbye
But I couldn’t very well see my father in that shell
Only the Ever-Empty in its open eyes

He wasn’t there in those grand, wounded eulogies
Or the laughter of the mourners drifting home
But in a tiny Richmond bar
Sharing ciders after dark
I could feel him in the music, when you hummed along

Oh, I know it’s only early days
But I want a life with you
Four walls and the sky with you

Oh, I know it’s only early days
But I wanna cry with you
Never hide from you
Burn apple pie with you
Drink in the afternoon
Under the aching moon
Worship the way you move
Gracefully leave our youth
Hold it inside us too
Start a few lives anew
Move somewhere wild and blue
One day, like he taught me to
I wanna die with you

…Does that sound okay?