i'm doing a new feature on my newsletter—The Five Hundred Word Review. How it works: 1) i pick a newly released single, and 2) talk a bunch about it!

This week's review is "You Slipped Away" by @andyshauf

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How do you say “nostalgia” with just a four-chord vamp?

For Andy Shauf, the answer: opening with what sounds like a typical resolution, with a surprise around the last corner. The fourth chord is augmented—a chord type known for creating a mysterious or unsettled sound.

In “You Slipped Away”, Shauf intentionally perplexes his own architecture, while crooning on the post-heartbreak shock where one can still see the shadow of the happiness they’ve just lost with such clarity that its absence just feels like a joke.

The song also exudes nostalgia on an aesthetic level. Shauf’s production style has always been reminiscent of the 60s, the beginning of the golden age of recorded music: subtle production, organic instrumentation, even the florid songwriting of the time.

Upon listening to the clear but warm mix, I encounter two seemingly incompatible thoughts. First, I wonder how Shauf gets so few instruments to sound so full.

Then, I’m struck by the details: a pad of earthy clarinets arise from what felt like only sustained piano, delicate backing vocals braid their way around the lead.
The key to this trick is quietude, I think.

Even on his prior, more energetic songs like Try Again (You Slipped Away is more of a ruminative shuffle), none of the instruments are crushed to death with compression.

They instead find a comfortable position next to each other—shoulders bumping here and there, perhaps—but not one is fighting for attention at any given moment.

There is a certain fetishism of vintage sound in indie pop music, but usually artists who borrow such ideas limit themselves to sampling from the purely aesthetic or rhythmic.

e.g., a tremolo evoking psychedelic rock, or an infectious disco beat underlying a song with otherwise modern sounds. Shauf seems to also pull as much from vintage songwriting cues as he does from production, instrumentation.

His use of the unstable-sounding half-diminished chord as first in the verse is one such pop anachronism. Paired with the dominant chord, the piece then revisits the pair again, evoking a drunken see-saw motion.

One gets the impression that the narrator might be drinking their sorrows away. This heartsick pair returns again in an instrumental bridge while a defeated bassline trundles lower with each repetition.

It’s a sort of bittersweet sound, at times reminding me of "Tears of a Clown" or the genre of crooner ballad in which the foolishness of love was highlighted in a sort of self-deprecating way.

This retro composition functions as a throughline that makes the aesthetic choices adhere in a more serious way. The line directly following this wistful motif gives the song its emotional gravitas when all instruments drop out minus piano.

We feel as solitary as Shauf does, left smoking his last cigarette, before dossing down into the familiar push-pull of the final verse/chorus.

Lastly, we revisit the introductory chords again, but this time, our augmented chord absent—does this final resolution represent acceptance, or further recognition of what’s lost when love ceases?