Perhaps, as the old adage goes, there is nothing new under the sun. Maybe everything has been done before. And if that is so, at least YEV is astute enough to understand that for the modern creative, that means it is through taking aspects and elements of the past, even if just as points of inspiration, and reworking them for a new audience, for new tastes and contemporary fashion, that you find your outlet.
And with this in mind, YEV gives us his new song and video, “Motherless Child.” Based on the iconic gospel spiritual, a song first penned in 1893 by Samuel Coleridge Taylor (the composer, not the poet) and has since been recorded by such luminaries as Paul Robeson and Mahalia Jackson, with Ritchie Haven’s take on it appearing in the soundtrack of Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Sadly, in all that time, its themes of loneliness and enslavement, pain, and despair have only become more relevant over that time.
YEV maintains the original feeling of the song and then pushes those gospel yearnings into even more heightened and emotive territory with the poise and polish of the delivery and through the use of a beat that echoes the sounds of chain gangs, additional harmonies born of church choirs, some searing and scintillating guitars and the ebb and flow of the Hammond organ.
Of course, the question on everyone’s lips is not why he turned to such an old song, one so drenched in pain and anguish for inspiration, but why we still live in a world where he feels he needs to.
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