Unreasonably Quiet

single

Unreasonably Quiet

Rose builds this one on a 3/4 pulse at a brisk clip, which is the first surprise: a waltz that never asks you to sway, driven instead by a Hammond groove and gritty guitar working against the meter rather than settling into it. The lyric is the thorniest he’s written since the abstractions of ‘Prepositions,’ turning a Greek word for a woven basket into a meditation on what we hold and what we let fall through, and when the chorus lands on ‘Unreasonably quiet and silently loud,’ the paradox pays off in the arrangement itself, dense and swelling one moment, spacious the next. His deep baritone rides the middle of it comfortably, and the instrumental stretch around the four-minute mark, that spiral into organ and guitar before the final chorus returns, gives the five-plus minutes room to breathe rather than sprawl. It asks more of a listener than ‘Them Bones’ did, and the payoff comes on the second or third pass rather than the first: a grower, but a rewarding one for those willing to sit with it.

Official visual

Unreasonably Quiet music video

Lyrics

The talaros, a woven openwork Holds what’s thought true Misconstrued as you And what is not falls through The weavers never meant to hold Such weight upon the stakes Nothing freely escapes The account of our mistakes

Every choice a new example Of the flame or just the candle

A tablet scored, a page impressed A vivid description of what works best All mostly meaningless Not subject nor object nor truth disavowed Unreasonably quiet and silently loud Of woven edge and borrowed reeds The talaros serves, then releases Once holding on, then letting go Of all the weight it gathers Better still, to let them go What’s holding and what’s held The talaros never failed You are not what it gathered

Every choice a new example Of the flame or just the candle A tablet scored, a page impressed A vivid description of what works best All mostly meaningless Not subject nor object nor truth disavowed Unreasonably quiet and silently loud