The song outranks everyone who touches it. Nobody can name its author. The Golden Gate Quartet put it on wax in 1946, Odetta and Johnny Cash both took their turns, and Elvis Presley turned it into a thunderclap in 1967. It is less a hymn than a sermon with a pulse: God is watching, you can run and hide and slip and slide, and none of it will help. Covering it is like being handed a loaded revolver at a christening. Ezatoff, to her enormous credit, holds it like someone who knows precisely what is in her hand.

Her masterstroke, and the credit belongs to producer Brian Speer, is to refuse a choir. Every voice on the record is hers: lead, response, harmony, the lot. Call-and-response traditionally needs two parties, so here a woman argues with herself and conjures the congregation out of thin air. It could have curdled into a hen night at a karaoke bar. Instead it sounds like a hall of mirrors in which every reflection has a conscience. The harmonies stack higher as the song advances, and by the closing stretch the whole business is thundering along like a runaway train. Studio gossip reportedly likened it to a film score, and for once the gossip undersells the thing.

Credit is also due to Aaron Minick, whose arrangement deserves its own plaque. As the son of Johnny Minick of the Happy Goodman Family, he has inherited a feel for gospel as high drama, and he scores the song's central image with a fugitive's panic. When the lyric talks of running and hiding, you can practically see the coat-tails flapping. He frames the tenderness and the terror of the text as twin sides of one coin, and the veteran hands of Gary Lunn, Dave Cleveland and engineer Steve Allen keep the whole thing lean, weighty and unfussy.

Then there is the singing itself, which is the finest thing here. Ezatoff delivers the words as a preacher might, patiently, without hurry, pitched on the border between comfort and dread. Gospel-adjacent vocalists so often mistake volume for conviction and belt the rafters into submission. She does the harder thing and lets restraint do the frightening. A God who is gentle and terrifying in the same breath is the beating heart of this song, and she never flinches from either half. The nods to Presley's version are affectionate and pointed rather than pious. Nothing here is mimicry, and everything is a curtsy.

Purists will always bristle at a modern polish applied to a folk hymn of this vintage, and anyone measuring her against the King is picking a fight nobody wins. Yet the ambition is the point. The single wants to be a tribute and a reinvention at once, and it very nearly pulls off both.

It arrives with an Unsigned Only Music Awards semi-final nod in the Best Christian Song category, and it deserves a wider hearing than that. Ezatoff has taken a song about the impossibility of escape and made it hard to walk away from.