Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
The poet’s responsibility is to reveal the inner beauty in the uncomfortable feeling. Sadness and hurt are as vital as joy and celebration when creating a piece of art that digs deep into the heart, and even in a melancholy view can be uplifting and reverential, a pleasure of memory despite what was lost in the process.
Everything we know is down to the lessons that were given to us with a price, that of love, for in that love we know one day we will lose that special person, they will leave us; it is an inevitable as a poet’s lament or a musician’s exploration.
Only Child, the phenomenally talented Liverpool songwriter and musician Alan O’ Hare, is unafraid of being a poet that brings emotion and realisation to the fore when portraying the loss of those who taught us the invaluable, and Everything I Know, Only Child’s new single, is arguably a pre-eminent song that encapsulates all that Mr. O’Hare brings to the world, and the truth of what it feels like to acknowledge those who taught you life’s important lessons, and did so because they loved you.
To feel that love, to understand the vital muse, is to be in the company of giants, and ahead of the forthcoming fifth studio album by Only Child is to smile in gladness of having had the opportunity to hear a single that will no doubt be a major instalment of what will be one of the albums of 2024.
Everything I Know is the acknowledgement of life, it will hurt in time, but the truth of it is in loss we have respect, in lament we are able to be better than we are, in sorrow we can be magnificent; and to be clear, in the hands of Only Child, in the soul of Alan O’Hare, there is an abundance of splendour and glory that is humble and embracing.
Only Child will be performing at the Thornton Hough Village Club on Saturday 15th November and Handyman Brewery on Smithdown Road, Liverpool, on December 7th. Ian D. Hall