The new single by Westingway, titled Grace possesses certain warmth to it. It does not smack you across the face with a lightning bolt, it just sort of rolls out like the warm hug of an old friend and sinks in with such earnestness it seems extraordinarily natural. It is not simply a song about heartbreak, this is a visceral, vibrating declaration of the naked willpower needed to fight your way back to love when you have lost it.
The voice of Jon Wheeler is the hook here. It has the feel of experience, of that well-loved, impossible soft flannel shirt – worn-in, reassuring and with a quality of timelessness that is just right in the Americana of the song. His performance is full of an inwardly painful sensitivity and a silent strength that is torn directly out of the notebooks of a personal journal, and as such, the emotional journey is completely convincing.
The instrumentation encircles his vocals the way the campfire smoke curls up on a still night. Through the plunky acoustic guitars pedal steel sighs and is supported by restrained, natural percussion. It builds an auditory room that is at once intimate and vast, comfortable but with the dust of the road.
Grace seems like a summing up of Westingway so far, taking the rootsy vibe, the rockier passages and the lush harmonies that were hinted at on earlier releases and coming up with their strongest statement to date. It reminds of the giants, of course, like the muddy narrations of Tyler Childers reunited with the stadium-size heart of The Lumineers, with the ghost of Wheeler’s influences hovering over the shoulder, be it Jason Isbell or Wilco, but it sounds very much like itself.
It is a song meant to be reflective and it is best listened to with the sun setting on an empty road. It is the story of the painful, gorgeous process of returning to belonging, and gives us the reminder that the path itself, marked with Grace, is sometimes every bit as significant as the arrival. A truly Americana gem.
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