When they say that music is cathartic, that it can be used as a healing process, to exorcise the complex and often dark thoughts that we struggle with, to help lift our emotional burdens, it isn’t just a throwaway platitude. And no one knows this better than Rebecca Aadland. Following the sudden and unexpected loss of her husband, she found herself in a place where creativity and songwriting seemed lost to her, the artistic well was dry.
One day, she wrote the line “ “I could use a miracle, my world went black years ago” as a plea to try and find some sense in this world of pain, and it seemed to unlock whatever was holding her back, allowing the waters to start to flow once more, creatively speaking. And thus “I Could Use A Miracle” was born.
For a song that, lyrically at least, sounds like a cry for help or a communion with the universe for greater understanding, musically, it is surprisingly upbeat and infectious. It becomes clear very quickly that this is a stepping stone in that long walk back towards the light, and a very crucial one.
Musically, it is both layered, full of lovely musical motifs and fine details, and yet still feels spacious and of the singer-songwriter world, despite the growing beats, the touches of electric guitar, and the half-heard, half-felt washes of keyboard and other textures that frame her own guitar and vocals. This is sonic eloquence in action, that precise blend of the ornate and the understated.
Such songs are essential, those moments that help us to find ourselves again, breakthroughs that enable us to get back on track, never the same one, obviously, but an equally productive and hopefully happy one as the previous one, the one you thought would guide the rest of your life.
If “I Could Use A Miracle” is a great song to you and me, but without doubt it is an important milestone in Rebecca Aadland’s life.
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