"The World Began This Morning" is, on its surface, a song about change. But to leave it at that would be rather like describing Ziggy Stardust as a bloke in a jumpsuit. Folino's real subject is the terrifying tenderness of self-confrontation — the moment when the mirror stops flattering and starts demanding. The track operates as a manifesto of courage dressed in melody, calling its listener not merely to survive the world but to face it, as the press materials rightly suggest, with love intact and eyes open. It is, in the parlance of a less precise age, a bloody good anthem.
The production, overseen by Thomas McKay, deserves commendation for knowing when to step forward and when to disappear. The instrumentation is lush without being suffocating — a quality far harder to achieve than most producers will admit — and it moves with the unhurried confidence of early-seventies progressive pop, that peculiar moment when rock had not yet abandoned its ambitions of grandeur but had not yet disappeared entirely up its own mythology. Think of the warm orchestral swell of early Bowie, the architectural patience of 10cc at their most emotionally honest, the moment on a classic Roxy Music track when the arrangement opens up like a cathedral door. Folino inhabits this sonic territory with genuine affection rather than mere pastiche, which is the crucial distinction.
The Bowie comparisons that trail this record are not unearned, though they require some nuance. Folino is not attempting impersonation — a fool's errand at the best of times — but rather working within the same emotional grammar: the arena-sized feeling contained within the intimate lyric, the melody that seems to arrive from somewhere slightly outside ordinary time, the voice that suggests it has seen a great deal and found most of it, ultimately, survivable. His vocals blend the emotive with the precise, carrying the peculiarly modern weight of indie-rock introspection whilst reaching toward something more expansive. The crescendo, when it arrives, earns its keep.
Davide Direnzo's drumming merits particular mention. The percussion here is not merely functional time-keeping but rather a conversation — propulsive when the song demands momentum, restrained when the lyric requires space to breathe. And Katey Morley's backing vocals add a spectral warmth that anchors the track's more atmospheric passages without softening the essential edge. These are collaborators who understand that a great song is a collective act of restraint as much as expression.
Folino hails from what he himself describes as "quietly strange suburbia" — that distinctly North American phenomenon of the perfectly maintained lawn behind which extraordinary anxieties quietly fester. It is fertile ground for a songwriter, and he has clearly been paying attention for some time. The suburban gothic runs beneath his music like an underground river: you might not see it at the surface, but the land above it is shaped by its presence. The peculiar unease, the sense that beneath the mundane something vast and uncharted lies waiting — these are textures that elevate "The World Began This Morning" beyond the territory of the merely well-crafted single into something approaching a genuine artistic statement.
The optimism of the track deserves acknowledgement, because optimism is genuinely difficult to pull off without tipping into the saccharine. Folino navigates this with a lyricist's instinct for tension — the hopefulness here is not the naïve variety that has never encountered difficulty, but the harder-won kind that has looked at difficulty squarely and decided, with full awareness of the costs involved, to proceed anyway. That is a more interesting kind of hope. It is the kind worth writing songs about.
Whether "Hours for the Taking" — the album from which this single is drawn — fulfils the considerable promise on display here remains to be seen. But on the basis of this offering, Eric Folino is an artist very much in the process of arriving somewhere worth the journey. This morning, at least, the world is his.