Eddy Mann doesn’t simply write songs. He builds sanctuaries. With “Fly, Fly Away,” the Philadelphia songsmith and religious seeker opens the door to at least one extra holy house — this one carved out of quiet guitar strings and the hushed breath of acceptance.
There isn’t any crescendo right here. No thunderclap or crashing tide. Only a breeze whispering via the bushes at nightfall, a smooth voice providing permission to let go. The monitor, the sixth single from Mann’s Flip Up the Divine, lands like a psalm set to roots and reverence. It’s a benediction in movement, a prayer whispered on the fringe of goodbye.
Mann sings with a readability that feels much less like efficiency and extra like presence. Every lyric drifts like smoke from a morning campfire, the heat nonetheless clinging to it. “Fly away to the place happiness grows,” he affords, not as a want however as a reality. The type of reality born from realizing that holding on too lengthy may be its personal type of sorrow.
There’s a pastoral high quality within the music — a smooth sway that owes as a lot to Appalachian folks because it does to back-porch gospel. The acoustic guitar carries the melody like a gradual hand on the shoulder. No urgency, no insistence. Simply the light pacing of somebody who has walked this path earlier than and is aware of the place the sunshine breaks via the bushes.
What Eddy Mann does greatest — and what he does once more right here — is locate the sacred within the soil. He doesn’t preach. He listens. He leaves house. He permits the listener to convey their very own burdens to the track and discover a place to put them down. In “Fly, Fly Away,” that act of give up turns into the refrain, the chorus, the entire level.
There’s a deep religious present beneath this monitor, one that pulls from Scripture and soul alike. Ecclesiastes reminds us that there’s a time to carry on and a time to let go. Mann lives in that stress, and provides it voice.
For followers of John Michael Talbot, Buddy Miller, and the softer shadows of Americana’s devotional nook, “Fly, Fly Away” is a quiet triumph. It doesn’t ask to your consideration. It waits till you want it — then wraps you in its arms like an previous buddy and says, “It’s time.”
And perhaps, simply perhaps, you’ll imagine it.
–Dan McCormick
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