‘Pool’: How an acoustic cover can change everything
Never let it be said that the live experience isn’t a magical thing, as legends like Bruce Springsteen to modern artists such as Samia have experienced its power and rocked our socks off in tandem.
Choosing songs and listening to music is an incredibly private and intimate thing, and yet it’s a microcosm of the world you inhabit. When you connect with a song, you might feel it’s been written solely for you, while there are people in the macrocosm of things undergoing the same experience as you. This realisation should not dull your listening experience, but enhance it to the point where you seek out a circle beyond the friends you’ve sat down with to draw the madman’s map to explain to them why a song is important to you.
If you ever wonder whether or not we put too much time, effort, and money into music, just remember that it makes what can often be a lonely and scary life feel a lot more comforting, and helps establish ephemeral bridges between you and strangers that you remain unaware of unless you trawl social media in an obsessive haze.
The power of live music takes all these feelings of uniqueness and comfort and turns them into a tangible community experience, where your emotions are magnified beyond adulation. You suddenly realise that your tie with a song is something you share with people everywhere, and there’s real unspeakable magic to be stood in a closed venue, or a large stadium, and enjoying a track that means so much to you and so many.
It’s this power of the live performance that can sometimes give songs new life. Samia experienced this first-hand, as her track ‘Pool’ seemed to be given a new burst of energy almost half a decade after its release in 2020 on Samia’s debut record, The Baby.
Don’t get me wrong, people were already a fan of the soulfulness and the beautiful writing, but it didn’t get the same kind of attention as it has come into now, where it’s considered one of the greatest tracks Samia has ever breathed into existence, and this rhetoric stems from her performance of the track during a Tiny Desk Concert.
She opted to perform a stripped-back version, resulting in an incredibly moving rendition, with nothing but her voice and her guitar cutting through the air of the office space turned music venue. People everywhere flocked to the cover, enamoured by the way it seems to tap into the listeners’ souls, and its popularity has only soared since.
While her Tiny Desk Concert took place in 2023, a recent viral campaign on TikTok saw fans of Samia try to obtain a re-release of the version, and the singer delivered on the yearning, which is currently racking up listens on streaming sites everywhere.
Never let it be said that live music doesn’t contain an unprecedented element that can’t be replicated anywhere else within the artistic world. An unspoken bond is suddenly made tactile, and this exists in big ballads and serene songs, allowing fans to continue living in that pocket of a beautiful live rendition.
