A little over a month ago, Tish Melton released her debut collection of songs with her When We’re Older EP compiling all of the teen songwriter and Brandi Carlile protege’s earliest recordings and padding it out with a few new ones. One of those early singles was “Damage,” a sparse piano ballad that opens up into an emotional orchestral piece in its final minutes. “I originally wrote it on guitar, but we changed it to piano when we got in the studio,” she shared of the track. “I was extremely sick when doing the vocals, and we were sure that the ones we laid down would be scrap vocals. We ended up keeping all of the originals, because of how soft and how full of desperation my voice sounds.”
For her “Neighborhoods” set, Melton opted to recreate “Damage” in its original form by strumming through the track on acoustic guitar, while her vocals sound perfectly clear. Set up on a balcony overlooking Hermosa Beach in Southern California, the distant crashing waves serve as an apt backdrop for the song’s tumultuous emotional content. Check out the video below.
