Basia Bulat - "Never Let Me Go". I give you this song, but I ask you to set it free. Don't trap it in cozy headphones or little laptop speakers - let it out into the air, through a lamplit room, loud. Let it out through an open window, or reverberating off your bookshelves. These calls and drones, dampened drums, Basia's ashen entreaty: be generous with them, be kind.

"Never Let Me Go" is not - by a large measure - the most immediate track on Tall Tall Shadow, her third album. There are many songs with swift, thundering melody, with clicking percussion and cheer, like little banquets. It is a record of rich dynamics, gallop and glide. But for me, "Never Let Me Go" sits apart. It is a one-off, a lone moment. A little like a single heartbeat (and it reverberates).

It's a love song, but not that kind of love. It's a farewell that is all about not saying farewell. A sincere, proud, begging, resigned refusal. We have heard a hundred songs about the times that people are taken from our lives, or they drop away from our lives, and we do not want to release them. Basia is not singing that song. She knows she will never release the person she is singing to. But what she asks is that they never release her. No, don't let me / never let me / go. From the far side of ever, long before you see me, say that you believe me, and never let me go.

The word death never appears on Tall Tall Shadow. It has been banished, sent out. Basia will not repeat Carey Mercer's brave mistake. Death is, and will forever be; but it need not be let into song.

[buy / Basia is on tour in Europe / listen to the album's lead single, "Tall Tall Shadow"]

(image by Boguslaw Strempel / via Colossal)