Eddy Mann doesn’t just write songs. He builds sanctuaries. With “Fly, Fly Away,” the Philadelphia songsmith and spiritual seeker opens the door to one more holy space — this one carved out of quiet guitar strings and the hushed breath of acceptance.
There is no crescendo here. No thunderclap or crashing tide. Just a breeze whispering through the trees at dusk, a soft voice offering permission to let go. The track, the sixth single from Mann’s Turn Up the Divine, lands like a psalm set to roots and reverence. It is a benediction in motion, a prayer whispered at the edge of goodbye.
Mann sings with a clarity that feels less like performance and more like presence. Each lyric drifts like smoke from a morning campfire, the warmth still clinging to it. “Fly away to where happiness grows,” he offers, not as a wish but as a truth. The kind of truth born from knowing that holding on too long can be its own kind of sorrow.
There’s a pastoral quality in the music — a soft sway that owes as much to Appalachian folk as it does to back-porch gospel. The acoustic guitar carries the melody like a steady hand on the shoulder. No urgency, no insistence. Just the gentle pacing of someone who has walked this path before and knows where the light breaks through the trees.
What Eddy Mann does best — and what he does again here — is find the sacred in the soil. He does not preach. He listens. He leaves space. He allows the listener to bring their own burdens to the song and find a place to lay them down. In “Fly, Fly Away,” that act of surrender becomes the chorus, the refrain, the whole point.
There’s a deep spiritual current beneath this track, one that draws from Scripture and soul alike. Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is a time to hold on and a time to let go. Mann lives in that tension, and gives it voice.
For fans of John Michael Talbot, Buddy Miller, and the softer shadows of Americana’s devotional corner, “Fly, Fly Away” is a quiet triumph. It doesn’t ask for your attention. It waits until you need it — then wraps you in its arms like an old friend and says, “It’s time.”
And maybe, just maybe, you’ll believe it.
–Dan McCormick