Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of collaborating with smooth-folk troubadour Stephen Babcock in order to discuss his current LP Said & Done. Babcock was a new face to me at the time, and I found myself immediately charmed by his music.
For one thing, it’s often easily straightforward without being stereotypically indie or coffeehouse. No offense to the Bon Iver’s or St Vincent’s of the world, but it’s often pleasant to just go back to the bare essentials of music’s bedrock beginnings. The era when folk music felt like an innocence rapidly turning cloudy, or… ya know, when a man named Dylan came along and changed the game forever.
Babcock has that same stripped down charm to his sound, as well as a sense for songwriting that combines to make for a hard punch in a velvet glove. It was a prominent force on Said & Done, and also makes a fresh appearance for Babcock’s latest song “5A”.
Shot in Central Park for A Remote Session, “5A” finds Babcock directly in his element. With just a guitar slung across his shoulder and a song on his sleeve, he strolls casually singing about a relationship gone on a downward bender.
He opines, “She was an hourglass, she could spare no time” with a gentle reserve some might spare for conversation eased into the picture frame of a moment. In a sense the cinematography of the video fits that conversational tone as well, painting Babcock as the everyman’s example of making the difficult look easy.
It’s a reminder of a simple adage that seems relatively forgotten nowadays: less is more. A reminder that yeah maybe you can’t get a bank of synthesizers or a quartet of strings, but you can still take out a guitar and make it sing.
Check out the video for “5A” up above, and be sure to go find Stephen on social media if you like/want to hear more of what you see! And be sure not to miss the line in this song “is it bad that I miss her mother more than I miss her?”.
It might not jump out at first, but it’s a deceptive killer.
On The Back Edge Of The Beat 
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