“No Sound,” Amelia White

East Nashville Stalwart Premiers BLM Protest Song

By Adeem Bingham, Editor

I have a candle burning that smells of cinnamon & spices and Amelia White is whispering poetry into my headphones with her new single, “No Sound.” Driven by her patient acoustic strumming and shaded with a palatial production, it could be quietly guiding the emotional bid of an episode of Gilmore Girls.  But the song is saturated in grief; both of sweetness and sorrow, like an autumnal dish. There is her deep and abiding love for her wife, explored in these sobering snapshots, “Last week we cracked the white wine / I watched your lips as you drank it.” And then there is the lowering of George Floyd’s body into the soft earth. “My tears have no sound.”

This is the important work of the creative; to eradicate the illusory notion of the “other” and leave our humanity stripped. It is in this lonely, naked water that Amelia treads on her new song. What if this weren’t a stranger at all but someone that I loved? What if we stripped away all of the socio-political commentary, if just for a moment, to feel the relentless waves of grief rippling out from a suffering man crying for his mother with his last breath?

Amelia White, Virginia bred East Nashville stalwart, takes a page out of the playbooks of “Ohio”, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”, and “Anarchy in the UK”: songs that act like a newspaper for people who don’t take one. Seeing George Floyd die on social media galvanized White to quickly write, record, and release this devastating jewel of a song.

White said “I’m just one of the people who watched the video of George Floyd being pinned down. It just really upset me, and it’s not like I was thinking ‘oh I need to write a song about this.’ I go to how would it feel if somebody unjustly harmed Melissa, my wife, and I think that’s kind of the place that song came from. Because to me it’s a human thing first.”

Take a listen.

“No Sound” will be available on October 9th on all major services. All proceeds go to benefit Black Lives Matter.