Hartman has spent his career as folk-blues's most amiable one-man band, all guitar, harmonica and stomp-box, the kind of performer who makes a stage feel like a campfire. "High Tree Climb" takes that same intimacy and lets it breathe outdoors. Acoustic guitar and harmonica remain the emotional spine, but they're joined here by synth textures applied with real restraint, and by field recordings of birdsong that don't so much decorate the track as inhabit it. The effect is less "song with nature sounds added" and more the sensation of eavesdropping on a session that was already happening in the woods before you arrived.

What's striking, and what separates this from a hundred other records reaching for the same rustic mood, is Hartman's refusal to give the song a climax. British critics have always had a soft spot for songs that decline to perform — that trust stillness as its own kind of drama — and "High Tree Climb" is a fine example of the type. It doesn't build so much as settle, the way light settles through a canopy in the late afternoon. There's no bridge that shouts, no key change engineered to jerk a tear loose. Instead the song holds a single, steady emotional temperature: contented, unhurried, old before its time in the best sense.

That "old soul" quality is the record's real achievement. Hartman has talked about the track as carrying a viewpoint shaped by gratitude and quiet acceptance, and you can hear that philosophy in every choice — the harmonica lines that trail off rather than resolve, the guitar work that seems more interested in texture than in technique for its own sake. It's a song about noticing, not about narrating. Rather than the conventional love song, it functions as something gentler and, frankly, rarer: an invitation. Hartman's own description of the piece — that there's room beside him for anyone who sees the world the way he does — captures the record's spirit better than any critic could hope to. It isn't a plea. It's an open door.

If "I've Been Away" earned Hartman praise for its cohesive folk-blues atmosphere, "High Tree Climb" feels like the logical, more confident next step — an artist trusting his own instincts enough to let a song simply exist rather than perform. There's a lineage here worth naming, even loosely: the hushed, plainspoken intimacy of British folk revivalists, filtered through a one-man-band's improviser's ear, then set down in a very specific, very real patch of woods. It's a record that rewards headphones and patience in equal measure.

Live, Hartman is reportedly a livelier proposition — unpredictable, physical, built for a room. But "High Tree Climb" suggests he's equally capable of the opposite trick: making a listener sit very still. As he continues touring through the Netherlands this summer with more releases promised, this single stands as a quiet, confident marker of where his writing is headed. Climb up, take a seat on the branch beside him, and listen to the birds.

**A patient, luminous piece of songwriting that earns its stillness.**