Sometimes a piece of music wraps itself around the soul. Who knows why? Maybe it’s the melody, maybe it’s the vocals, maybe it’s a combination therein, the way the singer’s lilt floats with the musical notes from the speakers—or through the headphones—as if murmurs from memory. Live long enough, after all, and remembrances good and bad wind up in dust-covered boxes stored on a high shelf at the back of the hippocampus’s proverbial storeroom. But a sound or image, or maybe a bit of both, finds a figurative forklift fetching them in no time flat. “It seems like yesterday,” you find yourself saying, though you’re well aware that it was long ago.
Such is the case with “Stick in the Mud,” a teaser track from London-based Dutch singer-songwriter Tessa Rose Jackson’s forthcoming EP, A Mirror Sometime, which is slated to hit the virtual shelves in January 2025. (It and two other songs, “The Antidote” and “Anti-Hero” can be streamed from the usual suspects or purchased together via Bandcamp.) “It’s a sultry…love song for a friend in the throes of heartbreak,” she explains in the press release.
Jackson also says of the inclusion of strings, “The song has an almost tongue-in-cheek melodrama to it, so we thought: let’s push it all the way. We combined two worlds that, in our minds, epitomize the word drama: the sweeping romantic strings of old Hollywood movies with the grungy chug of Elliott Smith band tracks.”
The song reminds me of the lofty pop found on Top 40 radio in the mid- and late 1970s, when layered songs filled the air. It’d be as at home sandwiched between Roberta Flack and the Bee Gees as it would, to bring things into the present, Lucy Rose and the Staves.
It was written, I should mention, with Milo Groenhuijzen of The Shells, the Dutch indie-rock trio that—in addition to the string ensemble—plays on the song. The other tracks on the EP’s three-tune taster feature collaborations with other artists, and both together and alone bode well for what’s to come.
The Old Grey Cat 
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