song: "Behold" - Sweet Spirit

photo: Roger Ho

At this exact moment in time, it can sometimes feel easier, and even healthier to escape into our daydreams. “Behold” is an enigmatic and engaging single that explores the cinematic quality of life, and how ultimately, no matter how much we may want to fight it, we’re always forced to return back to the real world.

On Sweet Spirit’s newest single, all feels bold, unexplored, and dreamy, with the six-person outfit creating this grand, bombastic moment of music that combines guitar, synth, and the unreal vocals of Sabrina Ellis. The track itself sets up much like a film, with Ellis awakening, admitting that a movie scene plays out in their mind. And like all great films, this too is filled with twist and turns, as the once soft introduction unfurls with grand measure. Ellis teeters between strained and soft, our grand narrator through a tunneling pattern of percussion that continues on, echoing against strings and keys that feel larger than life.

As the show begins to end and the credits prepare to roll, Sweet Spirit gives us one final starry sendoff, a cinematic conclusion that sticks with you. Lulling you back down to earth, pulling you from this once delightful daydream, “Behold” fades out, leaving you awestruck, dazed, and eager to press play to temporarily escape from it all once more.

As Sabrina Ellis said of the single, “We wanted to sing about the difference between projected fantasy and lived reality, and the fact that within our bodies, chemically and emotionally, fantasy and reality feel the same. It is in the sadness and the longing of the chorus that we feel the chasm between the fantasy and the reality. In the verses, we are living in one while aware of the other. The chorus lets us get lost in the fantasy, and it is sad to come back down.”