One of the great pleasures of 2023, for me, was discovering the young singer-songwriter Issey Cross, recommended to me by the mysteries of the Spotify algorithm.
I love Spotify. I do spend much of my waking life grousing about the removal of features I used to enjoy, and the many bugs that I have to find workarounds for, but then again that’s only natural because I spend most of my waking life when I’m not watching a film with Spotify playing. Before I signed up in 2019 I think my music tastes were growing stale, ossifying. It just gets harder to follow new music as you age, but I didn’t like being left behind by the changing face of pop, and I don’t ever want to become the kind of person who professes no interest in new music. So I think listening to Spotify’s weekly “Release Radar” feature was an extremely positive change in my life.
I don’t know how else I would have encountered Cross’ music. She currently has two million monthly listeners, which is pretty low for Spotify – though it was a far lower number when I started listening to her last October – and 10% of those listeners are in London, her hometown and mine. She’s not signed to a major label and as far as I’m aware she hasn’t toured outside the UK. In short, her global visibility is low.
But that seems to be changing, and deservedly so. Her songs, perfect pop with a drum-‘n’-bass inflection, capture perfectly the mood of teenage life; she is 23 or 24 currently but presumably, as with the early works of The Beatles, Kate Bush, Lorde and Milla Jovovich’s remarkable Divine Comedy album, some of these songs were written, or at least conceived, while she was a genuine teen.
Some of these songs are remakes of older songs: Moby’s “Porcelain”, Katy Perry’s “Hot and Cold”, and of course The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony”, the ne plus ultra of the “pop will eat itself” approach to music: built on an uncredited sample of the Andrew Oldham Orchestra’s classical arrangement of The Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time”, itself more or less a ripoff of an old gospel tune, “This May Be The Last Time”. To add to this, Cross is young enough that she may well have become aware of “Porcelain” via A$AP Rocky’s “A$AP Forever”, because while to me these songs are all huge, era-defining tunes that I grew up to, two of them came out while Cross wasn’t even alive, and pop is undeniably a different landscape now from what it was then.
These songs make me reflect on how the life of teenagers and young people today is different from when I was growing up, and the ways in which it never changes. These songs also make me feel that I know how it feels to be a Zoomer: the open discussion of mental health issues; the casual attitude towards recreational drugs; the neurotic self-examination.
“I’m a little high right now, and there’s way too many bodies in the basement”. “Get a tattoo just to feel something, dying my hair in the kitchen sink”. “I’m still waiting for a touch of oxytocin to feel safe enough to close my eyes”. I love the vulnerability of these songs, and more generally I find it heartening the way that the current crop of pop singers – Lorde, Billie Eilish, Charli XCX, and older veterans like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift – are writing their own songs, at least the words; these songs are expressions of personal feeling in a way that the pop songs I grew up with – written by anonymous Swedish pop geniuses – were not. These are songs that grow out of those near-mystical moments of teenage life – the dry mouth of too many joints, seeing the sun coming up when you’ve stayed up all night, the total yearning of young love, young heartbreak.
That sense of intimacy is even felt in the delivery here. I love the key changes in “Bittersweet Goodbye”, especially the three that are found in the line “Those moments spent with you ’til the sky’s turning blue”. There’s a charmingly amateurish quality to those vocals, because I’m not sure any professional would hit the key change so obviously and naïvely, or even write the song so that the vocals followed the strings like that.
And I love that. The music there, aside from being derived from the long chain of remakes of remakes mentioned above, came from Australian DJ Luude, and really, he could have tapped anyone to put vocals to his “Bittersweet Symphony” remix, and I’m sure in the hands of any other collaborator that’s all it would be: another “Bittersweet Symphony” remix. Instead it’s another chapter of heartbreak and uplift in Cross’ ongoing chronicles of what it is to be young in the capital. It’s also a great tune to dance to while clutching a tinny, like so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BmjVI712IE.