For photographers — professional and otherwise — no conditions are more coveted than those of the golden hour. The sixty minutes before nightfall, the most radiant of the day, are the moment to capture with the shutter and freeze in time. The setting sun bathes the landscape in soft, melting illumination and imparts a gorgeous glow to all living things.
That magic hour’s waning light is also deeply connected to nostalgia and reflections on things irretrievably lost. “Golden Hour,” the new single from singer-songwriter Bombardier Jones, feels like a long and loving look backward. It’s the sonic equivalent of the sun at its most gentle: a beautiful, warm, welcoming track with smart, empathetic lyrics and a bittersweet tone. This is five minutes of gorgeous, gauzy guitar-rock, complete with a sturdy bridge, a deft six-string solo and a chorus that, once heard, is unlikely to fade.
“Golden Hour” the centerpiece of the full length album Dare to Hope, has established the Baltimore-based guitarist as an inheritor of classic rock grandeur and Americana-style introspection. Since its release, its acclaim has slowly grown — it has been shared like a secret among dedicated listeners and true believers in the power of songwriting at its purest. Much of the set is raucous: Bombardier Jones can channel The Who when he wants to, and he’s a firm hand with a ringing, singalong chorus. But this is the ballad at the heart of the set, the declaration of purpose, and the song that imparts gravity to the entire project.
The music video for “Golden Hour” is similarly thoughtful. Director Philip Stevenson has fitted Bombardier Jones’s carefully considered words of imagery to faded, Super-8-style footage that deepens and amplifies the feeling of Saudade that saturates the song. Vacation shots, family clips, sequences that feature vintage automobiles and old clothing fashions — it’s all calibrated to produce that delicious ache that accompanies pleasant memories of things long gone. What we retain and what we forget is one of the main themes of “Golden Hour,” and Dare to Hope in general, and here’s a video that practically dares us to adopt the reflections of strangers as our own. The visual underscore the grace of Bombardier Jones’s words, the ease of his delivery, the lilt of his melody, the sturdiness of the song’s construction and the honeyed tone of this irresistible track.
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