‘Milk Breath’: The masterpiece that started Orlando Weeks’ second chapter
The sudden realisation of fatherhood must act as one of life’s most wholesome shocks. Delivered with the sweet perfume of a new generation and the comforting noise of a crying dependant now wailing into a life you are tasked with creating for them. It’s the kind of notion that can stop someone in their tracks. While most mothers can enjoy the connection of a child from pregnancy, many fathers will only gain such a tie when their child gasps their first breaths. A complex feeling that is expertly captured in song by Orlando Weeks.
Having left his role in The Maccabees as the band’s lead singer and principal lyric writer, Weeks was allowed more ample room to experience fatherhood than many of his contemporaries. With such space, the songwriter was not only able to allow himself to be fully enveloped by the ups, downs, and round-and-rounds of having a child but also captured the twilight moments so delicately attached to it. ‘Milk Breath’ is one of those special moments in a musician’s life where both professional and personal lives hold each other in a sweet embrace.
Released as the opening track to Weeks’ first foray into working as a solo artist, save for the score to The Gritterman, the beguiling brilliance of 2020’s The Quickening, ‘Milk Breath’ is a wonderfully poised piece of work. For the most part, it ranks as one of Weeks’ most intrinsic releases, taking inspiration from the moment he would lay his son down to sleep, writing the song in his head as he stood over slightly snoring scion: “When you’ve rocked him for 45 minutes, and finally the wriggling has stopped,” Weeks explained, “And the muscles have relaxed and you put him down in slow motion and then stand, without breathing for another 20 minutes praying that he’s asleep.”
There are touching moments across the track, one being the opening refrain of “my son” as Weeks gently murmurs into the microphone with as soft a touch as the blankets swaddling his newborn. But one moment that most fathers will connect with deeply is the line, “You’re so new / Still forget sometimes / That I’ve got you”.
For some, this may feel like a case of potentially dangerous memory loss, but Weeks’ explanation will resonate for a swathe of newly crowned kings of their castle, as the singer told Apple Music: “There’s a lyric in the song: ‘I sometimes forget that I’ve got you.’ I have it less now, but I still have tiny moments of almost like the opposite of déjà vu. The shock of it. Definitely in those first few weeks, you definitely feel disbelief. You’re so unconditioned for it, really. So I repeat the line ‘My son’ because I wanted to be back and forth between it feeling like statement and question.”
As well as the vocal lines, which Weeks deliberately orchestrated to sound both like “whispered and like a meditation of sorts”, all the way through to making it “sound like it goes widescreen rather than triumphant, which it did at one point. I think it goes more landscape now, somehow,” he sonically conveys a sense of suspended animation. If you have ever been in the presence of a sleeping baby with desperation for them to stay asleep, the need for a more landscape triumph is a conviction most can be on board with.
However, the duality of this song is the position it finds itself residing in on the back of an LP cover. The first song on Weeks’ first solo album is a spot that makes it impossible not to draw conclusions. While it would feel trite and unfair to compare the birth of his son to the evolution of Weeks’ career, there is no doubt that ‘Milk Breath’ can be viewed as an ode, intentional or otherwise, to Weeks’ two geneses.
The track is the perfect gateway to Weeks’ as a solo artist. Removed from the indie pop origins of The Maccabees and even the venue-swallowing sonic landscape artists they became as the group ended, ‘Milk Breath’ is about as close and personal as it is possible to be. Despite the perception of Weeks’ as a shy and reserved artist, here he invites us into perhaps his most guarded personal space and, in doing so, shows us his hand, tells us neatly of his present and provides a vision of his future.
