This song has restored my faith in the male-female duet. And in case you were unaware, popular music has a long and shameful history of horrific male-female duets.
There’s Meatloaf’s never-ending “Paradise By The Dashboard Light.” There’s “It Takes Two,” which is basically Tina Turner and Rod Stewart shouting in each other’s faces for four minutes. There’s “Could I Have This Kiss Forever,” in which Whitney Houston and Enrique Iglesias hang out in a rented condo while models make out all around them.
And those are the good ones. Down at the bottom of the barrel, we’ve got this sickeningly over-sweet number by Bryan Adams and Barbra Streisand, the inexcusable pairing of Dolly Parton and Sylvester Stallone, and the near-blasphemous duet between Celine Dion and a hologram of Elvis Presley.
With all that in mind, I’d like to introduce you to Small Shelter, a west-coast band who, with this track, remind us that guy-girl duets don’t have to be ill-advised star collabs or karaoke-ready ballads. Sometimes they can just be two people singing a good song.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. Lead singer Austin Smith’s falsetto is clean and delicate, landing somewhere between Jonsi and Bon Iver on the Male Falsetto Matrix.
2. In duets, the person singing the second verse often goes overboard, trying to outdo the other. But here, guest vocalist Jessie Land sings her verse with the same simple, heartfelt delivery as Smith.
3. The voices join seamlessly in the bridge, with neither once competing for space or spotlight. Unlike so many of the songs listed above, this one reminds us that duets are collaboration, not competition.
Recommended listening activity:
Holding someone’s hand.