Songwriting News: Pull by Joel Ansett is a Welcome Moment of Calm (2024)

It’s a loud, busy, frenetic world out there, isn’t it? Sometimes it can be overwhelming, I know!

If you need a couple of minutes to escape from it all, you could do a lot worse than to listen to “Pull” by Joel Ansett.

Gentle, confident guitar notes are counted in and a sweet voice with a hint of gravel and quiver starts with words that seem as straightforward and as minimal as the direct delivery.

It sounds as though two guitars are playing at points in this song which is as busy as it gets, and rightly so. The joy of this track is how open and intimate it is. It could be, perhaps is, taken from a live performance, where all you have is your instrument and the moment that you capture on some recording device or other.

With this level of minimalism, everything is a little more open to scrutiny, including the lyrics. So it’s a stroke of extremely judicious taste that the title of the song and the emotional centre of it too, is the word pull.

This could be a song for a loved one or a lover or a member of the family. 

Who is doing the pulling? A child at the sleeve of their father? The memory of someone who can’t be there for some reason? A lover pulling at the strings of a heart? We don’t find out and that’s a good thing. It gives the listener a chance to choose their own pull.

The lyrics throw up other questions:

Why does he go back for a song? What an enjoyably confounding line! No answers again, just that simple image in your head. Maybe this person at home inspires the songs that Ansett sings?

Or this:

This person is angelic, possibly because they’re no longer here, possibly because the love he feels is bigger than the tangible.

The extravagance of an extra bar before a verse, a small chord change, or the chorus line repeated at the end make a big difference in an arrangement as deliberately sparse as this and it feels really clever and effective to gently throw you with tiny changes.

Ansett throws the biggest curveball in just after halfway with a solo of sorts, but in keeping with this meditative track, it’s him gently singing da da da before the last verse.

The chorus is like a nursery rhyme or an old proverb:

And at just over 2 and a half minutes, when that last line gets repeated, the ending comes as a tiny surprise.

There’s no more answers, no more clues as to who is pulling and who is aching, just an ending as gentle, brief and touching as the rest of this beautiful song.

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