The new single, ‘Greatness’, has been two years in the making and marks a sonic departure in many ways.
It is a song of love for our teenage daughter as she reaches adulthood. It is a musical wave of comfort, mixing in the electronic pop sounds of youth with our typical Portraits chamber folk sound, full of words of compassion for her coming of age in what we see as a nightmarish era to grow up in, and acceptance of our own weaknesses as the (older) adults in the room.
For the young minds of today, it must feel at times like the whole world is stacking up against you. Parents can only stand back and catch our teens when they fall, and when they get things wrong, we have no choice but to admit that we all got things wrong at their age. In fact, we all get things wrong at all ages, but the penalties for teens getting things wrong back in our time were less grievous, less enduring, and involved less public shame, than those suffered by today's young people who live so much of their lives online. One line of the lyrics sees us saying to our daughter, ‘you know I’m not beyond failing, and not too old to learn from your young mind’. We at our age need to work hard to understand today's teens, and do all we can to keep up with their world, rather than falling behind and holding on for dear life to our own prejudices and outdated understanding of how things are. We can learn a great deal from them.
