We reviewed Selma French in mid-December and as a very late entrant she made it onto the NMC Songs of the Year list for 2024 with ‘I think I knew’, which was an explosive rocker of a thing.
‘Little Sisters and Friends’ is a more sedate affair, in which she asks us to look out for the younger folk, especially when they have big decisions to make that they haven’t the maturity for. They are “in unchartered territories” as she sings.
“You’ve got all the time…always I’m behind” she adds, evoking Simon & Garfunkel’s famous line, “if you need a friend/I’m sailing right behind”, the one that really made one of the greatest songs of all time.
And that particular motif repeats throughout the (long, six and a half minutes) song as if to emphasise the slow passage of time and the opportunity it presents to learn, and adapt.
She employs similar campfire guitar chords (as I imagine them) early on as she did previously but this time they don’t give way to rock, rather than to haunting violin notes of the sort you might expect in a Scandi Noir TV drama when a favourite but peripheral detective meets his or her maker at an unexpected moment.
Then at roughly the halfway point it switches into a more up tempo section in which your attention is drawn to wordless ooh-ooh repetitions that are as effective as those perfected by S10 on her ‘De diepte’, the Eurovision winner that never was a few years ago.
The song plays out to assorted violin expressions that could be taken as a representation of confused thoughts coming together to find a conclusion, which is roughly in line with the story she is telling here.
She may be signed to Hype City but there’s no hype here. This is a singer-songwriter sufficiently confident in her abilities to use a grizzly electric guitar with a string missing because it seemed to make for a good match to the nature of the song.
The album ‘No sign of rotten leaves’ will be released in April.
Reading between the lines of the press release I understand she might be returning to the UK this year to tour. If she can replicate this song live that is sufficient reason alone to turn out for her.
Find her on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/selma.bolstad (private account)
X/Twitter: https://x.com/selmafrench_
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/selmafrench/
