As the ancients have taught us, love waits for no one in this life, and when you find the person that you’re supposed to be with, there’s no sense in holding back from confessing your feelings to the whole world around you. Tom Keifer, a legend in the music community, is using both smart poetry and unfiltered, honest harmonies to explore the narrative of soul mates and eternal kinship in his new single “A Different Light,” and while the subject matter he tackles in this track isn’t as new as the actual melody it’s accompanied by is, that doesn’t stop Keifer from turning in one of the more meaningful love songs of its kind to start the spring season. This is an artist who has already proven his worth through the years, but from the looks of this latest single, 2023 is going to be even more exciting.
The guitar parts aren’t the loudest element in this mix, but the strings still have quite the story to tell us in “A Different Light.” Independent from the verses for almost the entirety of the song is a colorful tonality in the guitar melody that fills in the edges where the melody and the vocal fade away, and to some degree, it helps to contextualize the emotions in the verses better than anything else possibly could have. It’s not the backbone of this single, but were it to be removed from the big picture, I’m not certain that the song we’ve got before us here would be nearly as engaging as it is in this present state.
There’s a definite grittiness underscoring some of the percussive parts in this track that other artists probably would have scrubbed up before okaying “A Different Light” for release, but I like that Tom Keifer left a bit of a rough edge in the song. I would enjoy hearing more of his new work from a raw perspective, without any additional instrumentation outside of a lone guitar or a melody because if my gut is right, there’s a stronger chance than not that he would sound even more passionate in a stripped-down capacity than he does in this one. He’s the bread and butter of every powerful moment in his music, and that’s not always true of pop/rock artists.
If you haven’t heard Tom Keifer’s new music already, now is the time to be getting on the bandwagon and learning why critics and fans alike have been giving his work so much applause as of late. “A Different Light” isn’t exploiting his skills for everything that they’re worth, but it gives us more than a good idea as to what he could get done were there no creative barriers or financial limitations to come between him and his audience. He shouldn’t rush to evolve his aesthetical approach any more than he already has; with a cherry of a sound like his, I think it would be best for him to take his time getting the most out of his talents, rather than forcing something and possibly missing the mark in his future recordings.
