Searows’ “House Song” and “Dearly Missed” are some of the most jarringly beautiful songs of recent years emerging into our musical landscape. In fact, the whole body of the artist’s work brings something stark.
These songs are not for the faint of heart; their themes loop around seemingly heavy themes. Although ultimately mysterious and unverifiable, arguments can easily be made for sexual abuse experiences, suicide and self-harm, and debilitating, harm-inflicting mental illness in loved ones. These things are spoken about gently and resignedly, without bitterness, giving way to simple, honest sorrow and bewilderment toward the possible perpetrators. What we see instead is the agony aimed inward at the first person protagonist, as in this part of House Song:
Mark my words, there’s a thousand things
That don’t wash out with anything
I keep you clean, you surrounded me
And my windows are breaking
Something is rotten inside of me:
I have to cut it out, cut it out
Beautifully, this song ends not in the despair of the last line but in a long musical outro that speaks much more to hope, strength, and forward motion than nihilism. Seemingly, what Searows could not put into words was instead placed into layered, intuitive musical production.
Although many in music refer to our time as the “age of the ear worm,” where tiny song fragments repetitively show up in our frenetic reels on Instagram and TikTok, Searows approaches the work in a peacefully contrarian way. At a slow and deliberate pace, these songs come through as strangely confident and royal, demanding attention for the exchange of the treasure inside.
No one disconnected and absent-minded seems welcome here. There will be no pearls before the swine of our rapid dopamine-fueled desire for gratification. Searows will not be subject to that.
This is, of course, the mark of true art: that it can be savored, and also that it must be savored. There is no way into the heart of Searows except by way of slow attention.
The lyrics are a constant series of enigmas and riddles, with the skillful work of a poet communicating just enough of the contours of intimate human experience to grip the listener, but never quite revealing the specific meaning, wrapping the full essence in the distance and boundaries of alluding language.
As a songwriter myself, I recognize this pattern, especially when I consider my earliest work: there is a desire to say something desperately real and intimate without a full exposure of oneself or the people one loves. To the wrong audience, this is often alienating. But to the right audience, it’s audio gold worth digging and digging and digging for. The layered, opaque meaning makes it more compelling rather than less.
Although Searows is somewhat affected by the indie dialect of lisp-singing especially present in Gen Z, it is not dominant in a way that distracts. What does distract, in the best way, is the absolutely soft, distinctly and unapologetically pretty beauty of the vocal and rich harmonies.
Like Tracy Chapman, whose heart seems to beat right behind her voice, Searows is present in the vocal in a way that reveals a heart sensitive to and intensely marred by life. What we see in the songs is a deeply attuned and intelligent observer, as in Dearly Missed:
It’s nothing
A trick of the light at the poolside
Not the night that was promised
A pretty good view, though
You probably grew up being dishonest
What else could you do, though
It’s all that you knew
What happened in August?
A change in the mood when they look at you
Not enough that you noticed
But what else do you do in the dark room?
From a pure songwriting craft perspective, in this track the elegant and persistent use of internal rhyme in Dearly Missed is also astonishing.
As recently as the late 90s, “singer-songwriter” was a term exclusively applied to the true poets knitting words with melody. These were generally writers working on their own, contemplating their lives and stories and completing a whole arc within a song without undue concern for the market.
That term, since the advent of the digital age where most songs involve 5 or more writers and producers, has come to mean something often purely mechanical, or as reductive as “hook” creation.
But Searows fits the former category in a way that challenges us to again seek out that authentic engagement and sharing of human experience, with the darkness sometimes necessary for honesty, but wrapped in beauty. Notably absent, too, is forced expletives: Searows seems to grasp that life itself can tell the story if we simply capture it with accurately evocative language.
The end result is remarkably compelling and powerful—perhaps one of the most quietly significant songwriters of our generation.
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