Shannon Wright
Let In The Light

Delicate and strong, living words in the darkness.

In the night that provokes this love, my lazy hands vainly seek a dimmed, vanished light. And I find myself, in the morning, with a new and complicated mask in the closet. Because we all have our role, abused and impatient, to play. A few sporadic awards to compensate, defeats that tear, the precise and sincere will I find in your words of instinct and rust, abandoned among the refuse. Shannon understood that this story will not have a happy ending. ‘They’, the others who don’t know (or pretend) what the value of a cherished and luminous dream is, will kill the actor of the melancholy black and white film. The pain remains over time, tenacious and cold. No doubt will be too big an obstacle between me and your sigh of orphaned thoughts, Shannon.

The angular stride from the depths, a vague memory of B. Brecht and Kurt Weill, theatrical and Central European, in the aching piano of the opener ‘Defy this love’. The nervous, driving drums and the rough guitars in the folk/rock surges in ‘St. Pete’. The tender disillusionment of the chiaroscuro tones of ‘You baffle me’ (Cat Power and the more expressive Polly Jean), the soft and intense intimacy of ‘Louise’: those piano notes that console like a warm embrace, that broken voice that pleads for a last, fleeting dance.

A thirty-four-minute journey intense and penetrating, that of Shannon Wright, after the successful collaboration with Yann Tiersen in 2005. Human unhappiness, a cynical and present creature in people, is reflected in the lyrics and suffering singing of ‘They’ll kill the actor in the end’, in the fragile caress of ‘In the morning’ and in the broken heart of the harmonic games of soft counterpoints in ‘Everybody’s got their own part to play’. ‘Let in the light’ is the balance between folk and electric sound of the young Atlanta singer-songwriter, in the keys of an impressionist piano of Old Europe and the evoked cabaret, suspended in the soft and indelible ‘Steadfast and true’ or the autumnal melody, simple and stunning, of the wonderful ‘Idle hands’.

It doesn't matter, Shannon, if the story you tell is sad. If the protagonist of that old film dies, and the villains remain unpunished. Life is (often) not in color. Even in the darkness of the day, we can find the truth at the bottom of the well. Something that enlightens within, left in the light.

“We need the tender care of useful things, to prepare so bend the light to share. When there’s trials so quiet. When there’s trials watch for idle hands.”