Spectra’s "Calling You": From Teenage Heartache to Vintage Pop Elegance
Spectra's new song Calling You is akin to prying open a time capsule of dust, velvet, and the ring of a rotary dial phone. Written at the age of sixteen, the tune began life as a tear-streaked diary entry—a teen's plaintive appeals for phone calls from a boy who would not return them. Now, over a decade and half on, Spectra, openly gay and now very much in her comfort zone, looks back at that exact same tale with humour, integrity, and just a dash of smart-aleckery. Ruin has been transformed into beauty—a flashback revisited reimagined as an astounding beautiful piece of music both cinematic and intimate.
Recorded at Park Street Recording, Elgin, Illinois, with Tyler Ford on engineering duties and Ksenia "KSound" on mastering, Calling You takes listeners to a deeply formed soundworld. Its sound of ancient-movie hues—a buried piano, violin-lacquered, and a grounding acoustic depth—affects an old-movie nostalgic sound recalling the golden era of Hollywood glamour, but it pulses with a very modern vitality. The result is a dark pop gem that sways between whimsical irony and deep emotional resonance, as if you’re dancing in black-and-white film before suddenly stepping into color.
Spectra never pressured her sound to be anything else but intimate, but Calling You is a milestone, a declaration of artistic maturity. After last year's Home, which drew so much on pop-rock piano and guitars, this song offers a more restrained but more kingly elegance. Strings swoon in and out in otherworldly vibrations, drums swell and recede with strained breathing, and the final few seconds crescendo into cinema-style denouement where you find yourself holding your breath as the phone dial over to silence. It's spectacle as much as confession, proof that Spectra's ability is her skill at transforming vulnerability into spectacle.
The August 15 release of the single is itself a milestone as well as a foretaste of her live comeback that September at the Elgin Fringe Festival. Those familiar with her progress from Chicago clubs to outdoor festival stages know that her live shows possess the same depth of polish as CDs. With Calling You, Spectra proves that music, as individuals do, can mature. What was teenage angst is now witty conclusion, stitched together with good humor, honesty, and the smoothness of old nostalgia. In her deft hands, even hang-up calls are symphonies worth listening.
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