Songs can be an avenue to transcend time and space, using hooks to take us back to cherished memories or transporting us to a bygone era with an iconic guitar riff. However, they can also be immensely powerful reflections of our own feelings. It’s into this camp the luxurious jazz-folk track “Wider Spaces” falls. This track, which muses on feelings of complacency and confinement within one’s current setting feels like a mirror of the frustration that’s symptomatic of living through a pandemic and the consequent literal and figurative isolation that persist as a side effect of it.
“Wider Spaces” is the fourth track on the debut album Orlando by London-based group Seafarers—a collective of artists led by songwriter and saxophonist Matthew Herd. In a statement about the album, Seafarers mentioned that it drew inspiration from the themes of liberation and freedom embedded within Virginia Woolf’s works. Within these overarching themes, the band writes, are “threads of solitude, longing, and affiliation with the natural world.”
“Wider Spaces” seems to be the corner at which all of these threads meet and weave themselves together into a beautiful narrative about wanting to grow and blossom but nonetheless being hampered by one’s surroundings.
The track opens with a simple piano ostinato, setting the stage for this pensive tale. Lauren Kinsella’s ethereal folk vocals quickly enter, capturing these muddled feelings to a tee. They are powerful, full of the ambition to break free of the clutches of this restraining world she finds herself in, but also velvet soft, perhaps signaling that she is vulnerable to the immense power of this broken home of which she sings.
Lay the table,
Steel and earthenware,
Place the plates to cover the cracks.
Father’s coming home.
In this initial portrait of domesticity, there doesn’t seem to be much awry. Yet the pristine front is just that—a mirage obscuring the fractured reality behind it. Any “cracks” are covered up, and as Kinsella continues, this cover-up is only exacerbated.
So we grow in wider spaces,
Far beyond these tree-lined streets,
For behind these perfect houses
We’re all splitting at the seams.
No one talks about their dreams.
The subject is forced into what seems like a perpetual state of yearning for a place that nurtures and enables her growth— a place without the dreamless discourse that permeates behind these images of domestic perfection.
As Kinsella’s vocals weave this ever-complicated web of frustrated isolation, the backing instrumentals develop their own complex narrative. A swooning guitar intermixed with an emotive piano capture the longing of the subject, and the plucked strings create a dramatic, warm sonic bath the likes of which can only be created through jazz.
However, it is the final third of the track that really impresses. After a brief moment of silence—perhaps a moment of reflection—Herd’s saxophone and Kinsella’s altogether powerful and breathy vocals mingle in a beautiful send-off to these wider spaces on which she muses.
This track is a stunning sonic experience and an even greater reflection of the pathos that underscores life in a pandemic. The folk elements provide the emotional relatability that grounds this track and the jazz elements weave a dramatic soundscape full of longing and frustration. Ultimately, “Wider Spaces” produces a refreshingly unique sound that’s just a part of an imaginative album.
