Sam Drysdale Captures Heartbreak with Haunting Honesty in “Would’ve Been Beautiful”
The smoky pull of “Would’ve Been Beautiful” by Sam Drysdale sinks into your chest like a nighttime confession, the first note of a truth too visceral for the sunlight. This acoustic once-in-a-lifetime, buried inside his confessional project Bonnie’s Sad Songs, doesn’t just drift — it hangs, like an unspoken reparative payment cloaked in velvet. Drysdale’s vocal is a contradiction of strength and fragility, a tender knife cutting through a thin, mournful instrumentation. And, as a result, every note is imbued with a thick fog of yearning, and his voice moves like a soul through the terrain of the lyrics, at times softly enough to sound like a secret.
The closing lyric lingers like the final welter of an extinguished fire — a burn, but also radiating the bittersweet residue of love. It’s one of those songs that goes beyond simply exploring through heartbreak, to dissecting it with clinical precision, leaving you suspended in its aftermath, haunted but somehow comforted by its unvarnished honesty.
Resembling a midnight-chocolate confection topped with luminescent pearls, Ebubé’s “Lay With Me” offers a sumptuous slow jam that stirs the senses without drowning them in saccharine…