(June 3, 2024) I’ve been a fan of keyboardist and singer/songwriter Kandace Springs since discovering her self-titled EP more than a decade ago. She has an impressive musical range, moving seamlessly from the neo-soul and hip-hop influenced R&B heard on that project, to the songbook covers heard on her The Women Who Raised Me album and the storytelling skills showcased on Indigo and My Name is Sheba.
Those last two projects included two versions of the song “Simple Things,” which is a duet Springs performed with her father Kenneth “Scat” Springs, who died in 2022 at the age of 61. Springs channeled the grief over her father’s passing into an excellent album titled Run Your Race. In addition to being an in-demand singer in Nashville, Springs was also a world class track athlete who ran in college.
We featured the album’s title track in a First Listen earlier this year, and it is a touching tribute to Scat Springs. However, Run Your Race is a project filled with songs that deserve to be heard, and the next single to drop is the dreamy ballad “Closer To Me.”
“Closer To Me” is a song that is both intimate and urgent. The song explores the timelessness of the connection between two people and that connection can overcome any obstacle that seeks to separate those two people. The arrangement is simply beautiful. Springs’ voice glides on wings of acoustic guitars and angelic backing vocals, as well as her trademark work on the keyboard.
Springs notes that “Closer To Me” is the product of a moment of serendipity where talent and inspiration merge: “It just came out of me one day while I was sitting at home ,and it was so complete, I knew I had to record it right that minute, before it went away.”
Springs took the recording to the studio where her bandmates contributed percussion and backing vocals. Check out Kandace Springs’ “Closer To Me” here.
By Howard Dukes