Chicago-based songwriter Daniel Knox recently announced his new album Won’t You Take Me With You for release in January, sharing the brilliant “Fool In The Heart” in the process. Today he gives us another dose of what’s to come with the stoic piano-led beauty “Fall Apart”. He says:
“I wouldn’t mind anyone mistaking this for a love song but I really meant it for everyone. Sometimes I look at the cracks in things in a sentimental way, but other times I look around and think ‘what happened to this place’? That goes for my home, the city where I live, my body, and the entire world. Any place you reside you end up damaging somehow. There’s that part you’ve been meaning to fix for ages but it just gets away from you. I’m an optimistic person but I think that true optimism comes with acceptance. You have to be able to set the table in the middle of a cyclone sometimes if you want to get on with things.”
It seems unlikely to me that many would mistake “Fall Apart” for a love song, as it’s so filled with regret – but there is undoubtedly romance to it. Backed by stately piano and cello, Knox curates an atmosphere of sitting alone by a warm fire, staring long and hard into his whisky (or whatever his drink is, but he seems like a whisky person to me) and getting lost in memories of a collapsed life – chief among them a doomed relationship.
He seems to go piece by piece through the events that broke it down – “What you said you’d never sell at any price.” Rendered in Knox’s vivid baritone the memories seem tactile and well-worn, “Would you take me by the hand / Speak in a language I know / Give me the look that only I would understand,” he wistfully requests, before snapping back with the pained summation of where he is now, “watching it all fall apart.” Knox isn’t completely defeated though, and by the end of “Fall Apart” he’s miserable or drunk (or both) enough to promise: “You may think you’ve let me go / But there’s something you should know / I’m gonna show up in a dream / You’re gonna have a hard time letting go.” The thing is, he’s so invested in this story that he almost certainly will find a way to do exactly that.
“Fall Apart” also comes with an animate video created by Mofoland, which you can watch below.
Daniel Knox’s Won’t You Take Me With You is released on January 15 via H.P. Johnson Presents. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
