The song opens in a mood of settled introspection, Paschke’s voice arriving without ceremony or preamble, as though the listener has simply wandered into a room where she was already thinking aloud. This is a rare and disarming quality. Where lesser songwriters reach for the grand entrance \u2014 the swelling intro, the cinematic overture \u2014 Paschke trusts proximity. She writes and performs and records everything herself, submitting the finished tracks to producer Dan Duszynski at Dandy Sounds for additional instrumentation, mixing and mastering. The seams, such as they are, never show. The production is sparse in the best possible sense: not empty, but uncluttered, like a room cleared of furniture so you can properly see its proportions.<\/p>
“She treats self-delusion not as a flaw to be corrected but as the very texture of human experience \u2014 the fog we agree, collectively and privately, to breathe every day.”<\/p>
The central metaphor arrives in the song’s emotional core and it is one drawn from lived experience: a hot air balloon ascent over the earth, the peculiar silence of altitude, the way the world’s noise simply stops once you are high enough above it. Paschke has spoken of being taken up in a balloon by a lover, and of the melancholy that attended the knowledge that once the balloon descended, the habitual cycles of pain would resume below. This biographical splinter lodges in the song like a piece of glass caught in amber \u2014 visible, present, illuminated. The sky is not escape. It is perspective. And the song asks, with aching precision, how rare it is to find another person willing to float beside you in that quiet.<\/p>
Lyrically, Paschke occupies territory somewhere between the late Leonard Cohen and the more introspective corners of Aldous Harding’s catalogue \u2014 patient, imagistic, resistant to the tyranny of the obvious rhyme or the crowd-pleasing climax. Lines accumulate meaning through repetition and angle rather than through melodramatic declaration. This is music for people who have learned, often through considerable difficulty, that peace is not the same thing as happiness and that clarity, once found, is terrifyingly fragile. The chorus does not soar in the conventional sense. It lifts \u2014 which is a different, more truthful thing entirely.<\/p>
The accompanying video reinforces everything the music establishes without resorting to literal illustration. Paschke handles all her visual work herself, and the result is something that carries the same quality as the recordings: solitary, considered, slightly apart from the current moment. The imagery understands the difference between showing an idea and demonstrating it. Balloon footage would have been the obvious choice; what Paschke offers instead is atmosphere \u2014 a visual equivalent of that altitude, that stillness \u2014 and it lands with considerably more force than the obvious approach would have managed.<\/span><\/p> One thinks, watching and listening, of a particular tradition in European songwriting that treats the interior life with genuine seriousness, without collapsing into navel-gazing or theatrical self-pity. Nico had it. Vashti Bunyan had it on her finest days. There is a refusal here to oversell, to perform vulnerability for the camera or to mistake candour for intimacy. Paschke prefers mystery, and she earns it \u2014 not as affectation, but as a natural extension of a sensibility that understands music’s truest power: that the listener must be allowed their own experience of a song, undirected, unpoliced, unhurried by the artist’s explanatory anxieties.<\/span><\/p> Flying Above is the work of an artist in full possession of her own register. It will not top charts. It does not particularly wish to. What it does instead is make a small, precise, indelible mark on the listener’s interior landscape \u2014 the kind of mark that resurfaces unexpectedly, weeks later, when you are standing somewhere ordinary and suddenly recall exactly what it felt like to be briefly, impossibly, above it all. That, in the end, is what the finest songs do. This is one of them.<\/span><\/p> VERDICT<\/em><\/p> A genuinely singular piece of work from an artist who has located her own voice and, crucially, trusts it completely. Paschke makes music for the patient listener, and the patient listener will be richly rewarded<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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