#songoftheday / VIDEO: ELLIE GOULDING: “ON MY MIND”

Ellie just keeps getting better, doesn’t she?  Best of all, she never writes the same song twice, unlike many “pop stars.”  I put that in quotes because Ellie isn’t exactly your typical pop star.  She doesn’t hire 12 writers to come spend a weekend writing songs for her when it comes time to make a new record, unlike, say, Rihanna.  No, Ellie sits down and does the writing herself.  Does she have collaborators?  Sure.  But she’s the dominating force.   Also, her songs are not bubblegum pop.  They can be as catchy, but they’re more in the art pop vein, not unlike Lady Gaga.  Like Florence + The Machine or Marina + The Diamonds, she’s a true artist who just happens to make songs that people really like, songs that sometimes even become big radio hits.  Kudos to her, then.

“On My Mind” is about as different from Ellie’s last album as she could possibly get.  The voice is unmistakably hers, but if someone played you an instrumental of this song and asked you to guess who’s track it was, you probably wouldn’t have guessed Ellie Goulding.  With its massive, thudding beats, it’s a veritable banger that you feel in your gut when you listen to it on a decent stereo system.  (Your subwoofer is going to need a few moments to catch its breath after this one.) But what really makes this track a step in a different direction for Ellie is the guitars, which sound like they could be sampled from a lost song by The Police.  Add to that a hefty dose of synth and electronic bass during the irresistible chorus and you’ve got something with lots of original flair.  The clapper bits are contagious, too, a perfect little devil in the details.  But, best off, we have Ellie’s vocals, which have never sounded as strong before.  Of course, they’d have to be in order to ride these beats without getting buried in the mix.  “You think you know somebody,” she sings with a bit of anger, injecting the song with raw emotion.  This might be today’s #songoftheday but we might as well just call it #songoftheweek because the chances of anything else impressing us this much during the next four days are very slim.

Youtube info: