Any music that carries meaning will always reflect something about the person making it. Those who make music just for the sake of it, or worse, for the accolades and acknowledgement it brings, will always sound exactly like the fame-chasers that they are. And even if you don’t know an artist well enough to understand their full backstory, you can always hear honesty and authenticity in the music they make. You can certainly hear it in the songs that Steve Stinson gives us on his first album.
This gentle collection of songs is the sound of transformation: an artist taking the difficult experiences that run through all our lives, and not only finding the silver lining, the learning curve, and the moment of positive reflection in them, but also turning them into the most beautiful of songs.
‘Always on My Mind’ is a gentle and reflective slice of … well, genres are hard here, but it is simultaneously rootsy and soulful, understated and accessible, too smart to be merely pop, too elegant to be roots, but found in that thin section on the Venn Diagram where such sounds are found dancing together.
The title track gets to the heart of the album’s wider philosophies: how we turn difficult lives, once-perceived hardships, into empowerment, and how we can emerge from that cocoon, one woven from life’s slings and arrows, as a more fully rounded creature, like the butterfly emerging transformed and ready for a different world.
‘Lost in the Tide’ is gorgeous, deft and understated, the beats ebbing and flowing, the alluded-to tides realised in gentle sonics and string washes; ‘Make You Move’ is the most understated and modern of waltzes, and ‘The Ledger’ rounds things off with the most beguiling and watercolour-delicate of sonic arrays.
Cocoon reminds us that the biggest concepts and most poignant ideas can be delivered in the most seductive and succulent of sounds. It is an album that might have taken a long time to make, but that, of course, is the whole point. This is not an album made by someone who hasn’t been out in the world, chasing every dream, seizing every opportunity, and squeezing every drop out of what life has to offer.
