Emily Evans - ‘Perfect Match’
October 15 | Written by Jessica Pispisa
Have you ever listened to a song that gave you the thought that it would be a perfect fit in that one scene of that almost 40-year-old movie you were watching one Sunday afternoon? That’s the exact one we get in Emily Evans’ second single, Perfect Match, released just in time since we are all going to be spending more time indoors doing that in the coming months.
The tune is about a boy who has no idea he has met the right girl until it is too late. “My friends think we’ll be the perfect match/ If only you’d notice I was the perfect catch” sings Ms. Evans, as her floaty and delicate voice makes note. Ms Evans writes a scene of a missed opportunity for bliss that is obvious to everyone around her except for her love interest, and at the same time she smartly uses a sound that will remind listeners that how some of the best songs about heartbreaks are the ones that we’ve heard in a film. Marrying her lyrics of yearning and longing about a potential relationship that is taking too much time to develop “Day by day/ I start to losing interest/ While you start giving in for the first time”, with the 80’s mainstay that were the distant drums and synthesizers, one might immediately recall Roxette’s It Must Have Been Love, but never the full-on Laura Branigan’s Power of Love. There’s a cinematic quality Ms. Evans has created that is worthy of commendation, when one could have easily been reminded that we could just type into Spotify or Apple Music’s search bar for a “sad song playlist”. No need for that here, we’ve got a fresh one in the year of our Lord 2023.
The potential lovers do not get together in the end, but she’s not upset about it: “You watch as I am walking down the aisle/ You say “I object”/ I look back, just wave and smile”. She admits she might not have been too quick, but he took too much time. When a woman knows her worth, she’s not going to stick around; she’ll move on to someone who won’t waste her time, and will not let her easily slip away. That’s the modern twist to this tune: nowadays women don’t mourn for too long, we move on.
As a “self-described singer/songwriter of heartbreak pop tunes”, the Linlithgow-born, Glasgow based Emily Evans has created a song that is a slice of perfect synth-pop, that would be a perfect fit if it was needle-dropped in any given scene of a John Hughes film, had the late director bothered to properly write a multi-dimensional female protagonist. Luckily, now we have a tune to indulge that scene in the imaginary movie of our life.