Regarding the release of his new album, Torchlights, musician, songwriter, and music producer Vincent Covello has the following to say. “Torchlights is a pop/adult contemporary album embodying ten songs of love, life, and loss. The songs are about relationships, joy, heartbreak, and individual lifespans in the soul. Songs Cry’n Eyes, Time Plays Us All, Blow Your Mind, and The Next Life were released in order starting in February earlier this year, each with an accompanying music video. The mood of the tracks is romantic, inspiring, loving, emotional, uplifting, joyful, and sentimental.” For once, such statements aren’t just self-promoting spin. Covello, an over nineteen year veteran of the music industry, technically knows his stuff. But in terms of creativity, he is genuinely informed.
URL: https://vincentcovellomusic.com/
The songs ring out, loud and passionate in terms of their storytelling capabilities, yet wistful and quiet in terms of production value. Everything has been turned down to its base essentials, communicating the core themes and messaging in Torchlights to the listener in a manner genuinely affecting. Chip Schutzman, founder and president of Miles High Productions, describes the tracks as “organic, full-concept adult-contemporary, a standard light jazz album with an arc from the opening to the final song, which is rarely done in a world of singles. Each of the songs is a single torchlight in our heart that we share with one another and always carry the light with us.”
Again, strong words which prove entirely true. Covello isn’t someone who shys away from any inherent flaws when it comes to performing. Rather, like an old-school legend, he embraces them and makes them the most compelling parts of his act. Like in real-life, adult pop music thrives on certain imperfections made perfect by context, and Covello doesn’t seek to rectify anything by way of electronic manipulation. His voice is resonant, warm, and empathic – calling to mind unrequited love, the pressures of work and life, and the yearning for one’s soulmate that never leaves, whether one’s sixteen or sixty.
In an odd sort of way, the album reminded me sonically of the nostalgia present throughout the iconic Rob Reiner film Stand by Me. Despite some of the tracks’ inherent beauty, there’s an underlying sadness and slight sardonicism to the production of Torchlights. It adds something genuine, something ‘real’ to the equation which is often lacking in anyone’s work these days, something that doesn’t make the album necessarily transportive, but evocative of real-life themes in a manner that’s still immersive and compelling.
It’s a tricky thing to entertain without being excessively transportive. It takes a genuine gift at making the everyday, the stressful, the mundane somehow seem original in a creative context. In some ways, creativity is a sort of black-and-white plethora, but also antagonistic and an anathema to the everyday. A true storyteller can examine the fibers of the everyday, magnify them, and make them compelling for the widest possible audience. Covello aces this, the songs both beautifully written and yet so refreshingly normal in terms of their thematic content, devoid of excess dramatic euphemisms, and straightforward in terms of presenting unvarnished, real, evocative stories.
Mindy McCall
