Nathav (Mathilde Lunderskov) easily made the cut for NMC’s 2024’s Songs of the Year with ‘You still miss her’ from her EP ‘Moon River’ and that’s true. I have done. Missed her, that is.
Now she’s back with a new single, ‘Don’t Quit Your Day Job’, which I could interpret as a message of advice to me as I often dream about doing just that, so as to drift off into the music business to do…well, whatever puts bread on the table.
Like Phil Collins, I can’t sing and I can’t dance but fortunately I can talk.
The song is about “being trapped in the treadmill of conformity.” To stay put no matter what are the enticements not to. To adhere to the status quo. To toe the line. To run with the pack, to go with the flow.
I’m running out of idioms now.
She does something very interesting here. The single wasn’t a track on her ‘Moon River’ EP but the stylisation is such that the lyrics could be an extension to Holly Golightly’s brief song (the original ‘Moon River’) in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Especially the lines “Don’t waste your sorrows/tomorrow is a brand new day.”
I’ve never come across anything quite like that before. It isn’t a cover but it’s a transferable lyric out of one song to another (new one) that makes you think it might even have been lifted out of the earlier song.
Genius.
She uses a similar simple, almost classical, keyboard melody to get the song going as she did on ‘You still miss her’, the only difference being it is synthesised this time out.
Once her vocal cuts in the quality is such that it might actually be any one of the 1940s and 50s cinematic starlets, perhaps even a Judy Garland, or a Marilyn Monroe. And the production matches it, throughout.
As it progresses it morphs into a feast of haunting complex electronica that will have you tripping the light fantastic. But with the caveat that a wrong step could see her slip into the abyss at any moment.
It’s another shoo-in for Songs of the Year; I can say that with certainty even now.
Hepburn’s (dubbed) ‘Moon River’ went onto win the Oscar for Best Original Song, as well as Record of the Year at the 4th Grammy Awards.
I doubt it will be long before Nathav starts to pick up awards of her own.
Nathav plans to release a full-length album in late 2025, this is the first track from it.
Will it offer her the opportunity to quit her day job? Watch this space.
Find her on:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_nathav_/
Bandcamp: https://nathav.bandcamp.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Nathav
