‘Red Coat’ is the first single off of Adeline Hotel’s (the moniker of Dan Knishkowy) upcoming release “How Strange it is to See”. A songwriter who has been garnering comparisons to Dylan and Neil Young, I hear something else here. It’s not really like something else, it just is a feeling and an emotion that is put into song form. It is something I know I have felt before, but it is captured and recorded by this talented songwriter.
The immediate emotion is dark and moody. I am engulfed and wrapped in this feeling of melancholy and gray. It is extremely evocative, really pronounced in how it can elicit a mood so well. Deep, and cavernous, gray and dark, endless. The song itself is very reflective. I just want to sit in a dimly lit room, on a rainy day and listen to this song as I think and ruminate on whatever is ailing my thoughts. It’s not a sad or a misery feeling, it’s just contemplative and textured in such a way that leaves spaces open for you to think about the sparsity of words contained within the music.
I haven’t heard something like this in a long time. It leaves itself open, ringing out extendedly at the end of the song, open for your own interpretion, your own thoughts to seep in. This song and this music made me think and feel. Man, I love when that happens.