The buzz that Sharon Rae North has been attracting this year has been anything but minimal, and with the release of her new single “Heart of Mine,” she seeks to establish herself as one of the smarter vocal pop performers currently making noise in the underground. While there’s a lot of cosmetic charm to appreciate about this song, I would be lying if I said anything on the surface level stole the limelight away from the compositional framework at play, which is by far some of the more fetching content I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing in the past couple of years. North is a relaxed performer when she’s leading a charge, but her attitude shouldn’t be confused for a removed sensibility all too common on the FM dial today.
This harmony translates as pure intimacy from the moment we make contact with it in “Heart of Mine” onward, and although it’s a bit overstated beside the percussion, this was necessary to drive home the emotional weight of what North is trying to communicate here. She’s not relying on a fanciful hook alone when it comes to making her point clear to the audience in this song, and I would even say that she’s rejecting the streamlined technique a lot of her competition has been using every chance they get (or at least seemingly so in 2022). There are no shortcuts to be pointed out in this performance, which has not been the case for most of the music hitting record store shelves this year.
Instrumentally, there’s no question that the backbone of “Heart of Mine” is as striking as the vocal contribution Sharon Rae North lends, but it’s important to note that the beat and the harmonies aren’t competing for our attention. The lion’s share of our focus tends to fall on the simplicity and balance of this piece as a whole, and though some might point to the lack of indulgence on the melodic end of the song as reticence on the part of our singer, I think the opposite is true. She doesn’t want to waste our time with a lot of extras in this release but instead gets right down to the bread and butter of what her talents are capable of producing in the right circumstances.
If you’re under the impression that surface aesthetics are going to be the greatest takeaway you’ll have from “Heart of Mine” this month, you’re going to find that Sharon Rae North is a woman of more than a few surprises when you sit down to give the song a spin. Tracks like this one don’t have to advertise their sophistication with a lot of fronting in the mix, and by the time we hit the halfway mark in the performance, I don’t know that there’s any debating whether or not North is a musician of many talents, and she does manage to find a way to use just about every one of them inside of this four-minute treasure of a new single.
Chadwick Easton