Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

Depending on your age and just how much the weekly music chart meant to you in your formative years, there will always come along a song that hits you that you know instinctively would have achieved the coveted number one spot with ease. No matter the genre, it only required the right voice, the symbolism of its tune and the belief to see it soar to the very top.

Such a statement might be considered reckless, flying in the face of fashion and public opinion, but as Gareth Heesom’s Hold You In My Dreams takes hold of the listener’s senses, a memory of the true greats of the genre hove in to view and give reason, a ballad of importance in times such as we find ourselves in 2020 cannot be dismissed as just simply another track to pass by. Instead what we must answer is why the act of love that is out of reach, whether through circumstances or by design, has such an effect on us that we need that comfort, that emotional release, that a vision in the dead of night is enough to make the music you hear one of such beautiful sweet sorrow and heart stopping admiration.

It is enough that Mr. Heesom’s voice has arguably never sounded so full, so profoundly directed and rich as it does in this particular single, an amalgam perhaps of the likes of Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison cutting through the quiet appreciation, but it is also the right song, the flourish of emotion and truth sought that makes this particular single just make you want to declare to the naysayers that they were wrong, that the power of a single can still leave you heartbroken, devastated, ecstatic and overcome in ways that you might have believed was lost to you.

An absolute sense of definition in time, Hold You In My Dreams is a song for the age and one that you cannot but help love.

Ian D. Hall