It is a love song with no armour on. Satin and lace drift through it, along with romantic places and a name that rings like bells. A cooler writer would have snipped these images out in the edit, or buried them under irony. Joshua leaves them exactly where they fell. That is the whole point, and it is why the thing works. The song is conducted at the pitch of a teenager who has just decided that this person, this one and no other, was put on Earth for him. Anyone who has been nineteen and in love will recognise the temperature. Anyone who has since become a sensible adult will feel the old fever stir, and may resent it slightly.
Then comes the line that holds the whole song together: "Don't ever break my heart." It arrives like a hand reaching for yours in the dark. All that swagger and certainty about destiny gives way to a plain, shaky request, and the song suddenly has two hearts beating in it. One is the boy who wrote it, convinced of everything. The other is the man who sings it now, and who knows precisely what that plea costs. Joshua never winks at us about the gap between them. He simply lets it sit there, and the distance between those two people becomes the song's quiet engine. The best pop always does this: it takes something simple and lets time make it complicated.
Anonymity can be a gimmick, a way of buying mystique cheaply. Here it feels like good manners. By stepping aside, Joshua leaves the song as the only thing in the room worth meeting. You come away not knowing what he looks like, but knowing something about what he noticed, what he remembered and what he refused to lose. As introductions go, it is unusually frank, which suits the name.
I won't pretend the song is cool. It is gloriously, unembarrassedly uncool, and that is its great strength. Cool dates with remarkable speed, while sincerity, held steady for forty years, somehow arrives fresh. "Made For Me" is a single that carries a lifetime in its pocket, and it makes you want to hear what else is in the drawer.
