In “Beautiful Day,” noted indie recording artist Stephanie Bettman shines like the star she’s always been and successfully mixes two bastions of pop in a melodic marriage that you have to hear for yourself to fully appreciate. Bettman straddles a swinging rhythm while adding a dash of folksiness here and a pinch of classic vocal pop there, all the while staying relaxed and focused in her delivery. Her peers could stand to learn a lot from her cool, calm, and collected attitude, but that’s not the real reason why you should pursue “Beautiful Day” this season.
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This single’s layered master mix was crafted to please, and it doesn’t ask a whole lot out of us in exchange for the wealth of rich colors that it dispatches so seamlessly. Instead of putting the guitars next to the drums and the vocals, they’re on top of everything, giving into the rhythm of the song with their familiar and far-reaching sway. Bettman is in the eye of the storm at all times, conducting her ensemble of grains with as much emotion as you could ask for in this kind of track.
The bass provides a vibrant set of undercurrents, but they’re a bit too much at the midpoint of this track. This part of the arrangement gets a bit overwhelmed, but perhaps necessarily; just when it seems as though everything is going to come apart, Bettman slides in with a majestic lyrical offering that instantly evens the playing field. She never hesitates in her attack here, and even when she’s coming after the verses with a mighty zeal, she avoids any overindulgent temptations that come her way.
There’s no competition between the players comprising Stephanie Bettman’s backing band in “Beautiful Day;” in fact, they sound like a well-oiled machine. The harmony that they strike up in this track is much stronger than what I was anticipating to hear, and I think that if they were to go in a slightly more experimental direction, there’s virtually no limit to what they could accomplish in the studio together. This player has a voice that could support bluesy melodies, and it would be a shame to see her talents go unutilized in a bid to retain an exclusive audience in the future. Truth be told, I would recommend she expand upon a lot of the unspoken elements in this piece all the further the next time she records a single, just for the sake of seeing how deep she can go.
If this is a taste of what’s to come next from Stephanie Bettman, then there’s no question that she’s going to be a force that we’ll be encountering a lot more often on her own in the years ahead. She’s singing with so much heart in “Beautiful Day” and reminding longtime folk fans that the genre is hardly dead; contrarily, it would appear that it has never been more alive than it is today. In that sense, Bettman is at the top of her game right now.
Chadwick Easton