Ball of Wax 51 Songs: Levi Fuller – “09.28.15 (All Good News Forever)”

The last time I really sat down with a long tune was Joanna Newsom’s “Emily,” and I relished sitting down and getting lost in it for well over ten minutes. Nowadays, and in my own catalog, it seems that short is the norm, and the opportunity to sink into a lengthy tune has shrunk. Listening to Levi‘s piece was a welcome chance. The song starts off with a lush, warm, hypnotic guitar strum with Levi’s gentle voice pushing things along in a subtle but purposeful way. It almost has a lullaby quality to it. Midway through, though, another tone gets introduced. The actual part is simple in composition, but the timbre jumps out at your ears in a way that wakes you out of your trance and asks you to jump onto another plane. The slow and gradual inflation of volume includes perfectly mixed harmonic lines that end up overlapping one another the way that I imagine dough getting overlapped by breadmakers. By the end, you almost wonder if you can hear it ringing out into the universe forever. A very peaceful song.