The penultimate single in the build-up to Christy’s now highly anticipated debut EP, ‘Dancing With Air’ sees the Glaswegian singer-songwriter return to his busking roots in breathtaking style.
A slight change in pace to his previous releases, ‘Dancing With Air’ tugs on the heartstrings whilst galloping along with a zealous pace, set by the upbeat, John Martyn influenced, acoustic guitar. The single culminates into a beautiful choir of vocals, cascading piano lines, and soaring lap steel that surrounds Christy’s hair-raising, half-broken, vocals that sing “ever since you’ve been gone I've been dancing with air”.
Christy’s vocals on “Dancing With Air” are truly heart wrenching and completely capture the feelings of heartbreak and longing for the person you love who is no longer in your life. His storytelling is stunning, I can imagine walking through the house and reliving the moments I had with someone I cared about in each detail. The production of the track is just stunning and raw, the abrupt end is truly reminiscent of an unfinished goodbye where there is so much left to say.
As with the rest of the songs that will make up the EP ‘Homegrown’, ‘Dancing with Air’ was inspired by the break up of a serious relationship from a girl whose family had become his own, after difficult adolescence.
Talking of the forthcoming EP, Christy said “These songs are everything I have been through in the last few years...My first release needed to be real, genuine – either people like it or they don’t, but at least I have been 100% myself and I’m not sacrificing anything to be a pop star. They are sad songs but I wanted them to sound beautiful.”
Right now this track transcends a love song in the area of romance. For me, this track makes me think of my friends. Scrolling through my Instagram, looking at saved Snapchat videos, our shared Twitter feed of silly thoughts and things we say. I am moving back to where we all met and I have no doubt that when I drive past the Thai place we ate together I will imagine us through the window, or the times we drove up the mountain near our campus and would blast ABBA and enjoy the escape together. I know that many others are still far away or can not see those the love and care about right now. This track captures the feeling of waiting to see them again and seeing them in the things that remain.
At twenty four, Christy O’Donnell has already lived out several unlikely dreams. He’s busked the streets of Glasgow making £400 a day. He’s been in a boy band, acted in a Disney TV series, and even climbed Arthur’s Seat with Rufus Wainwright… But beneath the young Glaswegian’s many incarnations is a serious musician about to unleash his first EP. Though intensely personal, this is not simple, singer-songwriter territory: the effervescent O’Donnell counts Ray Charles, John Martyn, and Chet Baker as among his biggest musical influences.
O’Donnell explains that he found his voice as a busker on Glasgow’s famous Buchanan Street as a teenager. He’d always wanted to sound like Jeff Buckley, imitating him in the shower as a child, but in front of the crowds of onlookers as a street musician, he learned to let his feelings run wild. “Singing is basically letting out your emotions in a weird wail,” he laughs. “And after all the busking, I know a good wail from a bad one.”
Review by Hannah Schneider