Given the plethora of options at the fingertips of even the most amateur creators, it’s easy to forget that their can be tremendous beauty in simplicity and that sometimes leaving the production pyrotechnics on the sideline is preferable.
It is easy to envision Toronto singer/songwriter STACEY’s “Worst Part” as something larger, beefed up with a bassline, percussion, multiple vocal tracks, and all sorts of “professional” bells and whistles. Indeed, it sounds a hair above a demo, recorded in the privacy of a bedroom, uploaded straight to Soundcloud–its reverb and slight distortion could well be intentional touches, but there’s a charming fantasy to thinking of them as restrictions of circumstance. “Worst Part” consists almost solely of STACEY’s voice and a mournful piano (subtle synthesized strings enter the fray at two and a half minutes into the song, suggesting a production placeholder rather than the grandeur of a full orchestra), but it is all the more affecting for its nakedness.
