I first heard Angel Snow singing her song Coals and Water on the radio while I was driving around in the country just outside Nashville, TN. I think this was around 2012 or 2013. I immediately had to pull over and find out who and what this was! Soon afterwards I bought Angel’s record and had this song stuck in my head for months.
So when it came time to make my ECHOES record, which is made up entirely of songs by other songwriters, I added Coals and Water to my list right away. But I knew I wanted to find my own way to sing it. Angel’s version is fantastic, but one of my guiding principles in making ECHOES was that I wanted to find my own arrangement for each song and I wanted it to be different from the original. So I sped it up a little and changed the phrasing a bit. Most great songs can be done many different ways without losing their essence, and Coals and Water is no exception.
I don’t know exactly what this song is “about”, but I love the haunting mood. You should check out Angel Snow’s original version too, very cool.
For copyright reasons, I can’t reproduce the song lyrics on this page, but I think you can find them at Angel’s site.
Coals and Water appears on ECHOES. Watch my live acoustic performance of it here.
