Hamilton, ON-based artist Gareth Inkster pairs classical training with an indie-pop sensibility on “You Are Not Young Start Walking,” a song shaped by a late-night encounter with steam rising beneath a streetlight. Its reflective atmosphere gives way to a broader meditation on consciousness, attention, and the choices that shape our lives. He previously caught our ears with the track “Lee Shores.”
Pulsing acoustics and light percussion swell into the artist’s lush vocal presence, blissful in its tonal allure alongside descriptors like “a silent night / a blessed light.” A title-referencing vibrancy follows, exuding a layered vocal sophistication as string-laden adornments infuse seamlessly. A magnetic chamber-pop sound pairs with a dreamy folk guitar exterior, while the piano-led midpoint continues the beautifully atmospheric pull. Gorgeous vocal harmonies and serene guitar elements are a particular delight, especially as the latter grows into a twangy, heartfelt appeal in the second half. “You Are Not Young Start Walking” is a stirring success from Gareth Inkster.
The artist elaborates more on the track’s background, and particularly its philosophical inspirations:
“While walking back from Supercrawl (a music festival in Hamilton) on a very still, humid, silent night – it was some distance after two in the morning, maybe pushing three – I took a moment to feel that stillness that secretly visits even an urban centre in the small hours of each morning. A few feet ahead of me was a sewer grate and a plume of steam was rising out of it and seemed to be collecting in a circle around the streetlight above, like a halo. I tapped the lyrics out into my phone without intending to imbue them with any deeper significance, though I felt that they articulated well something which was more substantial than the mere scene before me. As it so often happens, the deeper meaning became clear with time.
The song itself is about directing one’s attention to the higher things after being governed by less conscious impulses and lesser insights for too long. Moving one’s gaze from the lower to the higher and recognizing something like sanctity there is what the song describes, for my part.
The second verse was wrung out of all the Kierkegaard I’d been reading in the fall, particularly his insistence that one must dare to decide. The true action must be a true decision, and -in a sense – only in doing can one actively be. To be is, after all, a verb.
The Kierkegaardian fascination seamlessly led me on to a deep dive into the work of Carl Jung. Similarly, he passionately calls his readers to a deeper consciousness. Without an awareness of the hidden motivations and resonances implicit in the shadowy parts of one’s person, one cannot truly be aware of what their experiences – or even their actions – are meaning to them. Any attempt to resist the facts of one’s inner life will perhaps successfully obscure them from one’s view, but they will surely persist.”
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This and other tracks featured this month can be streamed on the updating Obscure Sound’s ‘Emerging Singles’ Spotify playlist.
