Tom Minor – “The Loneliest Person on Earth” A Song That Lingers After the Last Note

Other songs seem too realistic just to end- they are more like words unspoken echoing on a lonely wall. The Loneliest Person on Earth by Tom Minor is just one such song. Not only does it play but it rumbles. The first piano chord gives a hint of something that is precariously burdensome. It is raw but intimately personal like a part-whispered confession you did not request but needed to hear. There is not theatrical build-up here. There is a low swivel, voice and piano only dominating the space with a heavy tone. The harmonies are added–warm, subtle–to act as padding to those ragged lyrics, which sound like confessions of a person who is deep into his own aftermath of a fracture. It is not the music you are listening to tell of the heartbreak but the trail of it.

The words are lean and evocative with one-line vignettes that spring to life at that millisecond when all changes: the power of a glance that is too long. And when the tambourine taps along, the pull seems so emotional, it does surprise one- what can be called a drilling- in that reaches subtle ache to stay long after the speakers go silent. There is no pop gloss, no shapeless moodiness here It is down to earth, it is of the real world, a little battered-but-okay-smart. You have the sense of an incompletion in your breast. Sparsely featured guitar layers come to drift in, not to fill the space, but to create the space to take a breath in the denouement. You get sounds but they do not engulf you. Instead they left everything you carried in suspense to have a muffle vent.

What Tom Minor does is deceitfully easy the kind of storytelling to make artist disappear in the story. It never occurs to you that it is a person singing. You simply get it, this might be your kitchen, your bedroom or your silent 2 a.m. replaying in your mind. And at end you are changed–not spectacularly, but by the echo.

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