Last Saturday I explored the second annual LitCrawl in Wellington, New Zealand. LitCrawl is a celebration of art, literature, and spoken word, and hosts performances and readings in some of the city’s most hidden and most beloved venues. At around 9 pm I found myself in Alistair’s Music Shop at an event simplistically called ‘Writing Tunes & Playing Poetry’. The shop was small, and because my friends and I were the last to arrive we were ushered into a corner at the front of the room next to where the artists would perform, the only space left in the shop. As I sat cross legged, trying to make myself small amongst the acoustic guitars hanging above my head and the audience staring awkwardly at me, the first artist appeared from a little back room at the front of the store.
He introduced himself as Fraser Ross, a New Zealand native. He was tall, skinny, and (don’t make fun of me for using this term), trendy. He wore green skinny pants, a tweed jacket, round glasses, and an oddly stylish bowler hat that I truly believe only he could pull off. He was soft spoken, and in the short time that I saw him I understood that he was humble. This song was one of the three that he performed, and it has stuck with me since that night. He said that it’s about an old girlfriend of his that moved back to her hometown in Scotland. He sang this to her the night before she left. He didn’t tell us how the relationship went after that.
The song is beautiful. The lyrics are vulnerable, modest, and above all, loving. When he performed in Alistair’s he was only equipped with a guitar. On the track he is backed by a band, the Felt Tips, allowing the song to take on a fuller form. I haven’t been able to stop listening to it. Maybe because of the gut wrenching honesty in it, maybe because I saw him live on a night that has stuck in my mind, or maybe because it’s simply a good song – I don’t know but you should really give it a listen.
