Photo credit: David Terranova
After just having released her breathtaking homage to oppression, “Marionette,”Selett has just dropped her new single “Wheels Within Wheels.” She explains to FLOOD Magazine:”When you feel grand things, grand things happen. Describing exactly how they come to be is impossible. It’s what everyone wants to know. With this song I was just so overtaken by a sense of romance in betwixt faulty mechanisms of communication. I’ve always loved idioms and I came into playing this waltz and didn’t even know I was singing an idiom. I got quite literally caught up in wheels.”
In the depths of a basement apartment nestled within New York City’s East Village, Selett diligently scrawls her thoughts upon a crowded canvas of paper. Amidst a landscape littered with cigarette remnants, a scattered ensemble of musical instruments, and an assortment of pens and journals, she gently sweeps a stray, golden curl from her eyes, pausing in contemplation before weaving another verse. In this moment, one would scarcely divine her extraordinary gift.
Yet, as Selett carves out a niche amidst her couch, cocooned in a labyrinth of books and fragments of paper, she reaches for a six-stringed oracle and undergoes a transformation. In just a few eloquent notes, Selett becomes transcendent, and the transformation is astonishing and entire. The thoughts she had laboriously penned mere moments ago—scribblings on thwarted romance, feelings of alienation, and the discordant, misfiring desires of love—morph from the common anguish of a twenty-something into Selett’s archetypal masterpiece; ancient pain reconfigured into seductively fresh music. A soul-stirring, melancholic ballad emerges, delivering the sensation of a first kiss, both surprisingly new and hauntingly familiar.
As Selett continues to play, she transports us to a realm beneath the smoky spell of her voice. All the while, she effortlessly accomplishes the miraculous feat of making her story our own; each plucked string becoming a resonant chord within our hearts.
Finally, Selett completes her composition, gently places the guitar aside, and a girl named Ashley inquires, “So, did it suck?”
