The English singer-songwriter Yoshika Colwell makes hazy, elliptical folk music that strives for trippy transcendence. A few months ago, she teamed up with the Vernon Spring, a London-based jazz composer, for the collaborative EP This Weather. Now, she's following that EP with a very pretty new song called "Last Night."
"Last Night" is not a Strokes cover, or a cover of the many other songs that use some variation on the phrase "Last Night" as titles. It's a soft meditation on a connection within a dream, with Colwell singing mystically over acoustic guitar, harp, and pedal steel. It reminds me of Beth Orton or Suzanne Vega, which is another way of saying that I like it. In a press release, Colwell says:
I wrote this song in about half an hour, sitting alone in my caravan thinking about a dream I’d had the night before. Moments of this kind of fluidity are so rare, but it kind of just flowed out of me. The truth of my subconscious mind rose to the surface, through all the mental mess & clutter and out through the song. It was one of the first songs I’d written for a long time that went towards what I was scared to articulate instead of obscuring it with metaphor or abstract, image-based lyrics.
Below, check out the Tilly Wace-directed "Last Night" video.
"Last Night" is out now on Blue Flowers.
