James Walsh – Everything Will Be OK

After listening to all 11 songs on the LP, Everything Will Be OK, I can confirm: You will be fine with it. In the nutshell, if the opening first ten seconds of the first song impresses you, then it’s a guarantee that the entire album will. James Walsh is the frontman of Starsailor, a band that is enjoying almost half a million monthly listeners on Spotify right now. Full disclosure: It’s the first time I’ve seen or heard of them so I have no context of previous works to rely on.

In this album, the vocals are the strongest component, and they do that job perfectly, holding the main position and singing the songs as the musical tide ebbs and flows around them. I hoped that winter had come and with it the kind of chill that would make me sip a warm drink by the fire as these songs would slowly dance the air with the lightest tremble of my speakers caused by the softness of James’s gentle, mellow voice. On most occasions he appears ethereal and his feelings are always in his music. His confidence as a singer and his deftness as a songwriter is always evident. I was surprised to realise that only three out of the eleven songs last more than three minutes and they are barely above that. These songs are short and probably the most melancholic of them all, but they are also very moving and well-crafted, so if you’re by the fireside thinking of all those things that happened in the past, everything is going to be ok.