Music Review // Michael Bernard Fitzgerald "Hoizon Lines"

 

When someone puts their voice to a song, I believe they can create their own sound as long as they're not trying to sing and sound like someone else.   Michael Bernard Fitzgerald does just this on the song "Horizon Lines" and the music follows right along.  A mix of dreamy folk that can be somewhere between Neil Young and Daniel Johnston, this sound also has a bit of Shawn Mullins in it, but if you listen to it enough you'll begin to only really hear Michael Bernard Fitzgerald coming through.

Within the skipping sound in the chorus there just comes a moving and romantic song here, but the romance may not be directed towards another person.   One of the first lines which really stands out to me in this song is: "I do most of my thinking while driving" which is interesting because I feel like I do too.  I've always wondered how it is that I can kind of zone out thinking while driving and not be a danger on the road but I always see people trying to text and swerving in and out of lanes.

The idea of driving coupled with the "Horizon Lines" comes together for me because it feels like that sunset is the end of the road.  Often times when it gets darker, as it gets later, that becomes the time to stop driving if only because things become more difficult to see.  But when taking roadtrips, you'd sometimes drive the day and then take the night to rest.  For a musician, the night time would be when you reach the next city for the next show on tour, so it can work on many different levels.

Even if you don't want to hear this as a driving song, it just has a pleasant sound that you can put on to fit the mood of whatever it is that you're doing.   That's one of the great powers of this song, is that it can adapt to its environment and so different people may take different things from it, they might have different ways of hearing it.  But in the end it is just such a familiar yet new sound that I think everyone can get on board.