Best tunes of 2020: #19 Doves “Prisoners”

“Hello, old friend
It’s been a while
It’s me again
We’re just prisoners of these times
But it won’t be for long”

For all the horribleness and traumatic change 2020 handed to us throughout its entirety, there was still some good to come out of it. And I’d have to say that somewhere near the top of the list of positives has to be the release of new material by Doves, one of my favourite ever bands.

The Manchester-based trio had just completed a successful run of live dates in the summer of 2019 after eight long years on hiatus. Things were going so well that they pooled together material that frontman Jimi Goodwin had been working on* with the Williams brothers’ as yet unreleased work as Black Rivers, along with some ideas that were leftover from their last album together as a band**, and then, tied it all up with a magical bow. “The universal want” was released in the fall, just in time for yours truly’s birthday, but not before justifiably teasing us all with a couple of excellent advanced singles, one of which is the focus of today’s post.

“Prisoners” and its lyrics may sound like it fits in perfectly with everything that was going on at the time but Goodwin and his bandmates have vehemently denied any connection with the song to the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that were happening all around the world attempting to temper the virus’s spread. They haven’t said if it was one of the songs that had been written beforehand but as they tell it, it follows the same conversation the band has always been having with itself in their songs. “Just over the horizon, there’s always something better. Sometimes we get trapped by our own behaviour. You can be a prisoner of your own thoughts. They can take you to some pretty dark and unexpected places if you let them. It’s a song about checking yourself.”

This song (and the rest of Doves’ newest album) has the group picking up practically where they left off. It’s beautiful and atmospheric and set apart in its own world. It all begins with a light strumming on the guitar and a sprinkling of sunlight and wisps of haze and then that driving drum beat kicks in and the bopping bassline falls in step not far behind. There’s plenty alien and new, but it’s not strange at all. It’s familiar and comforting and fluid and when the guitar starts a-wailing amidst all the glow, you just have to soak it all in, bask in the glory of it all.***

*Which, of course, was supposed to be his sophomore release, the follow up to 2014’s “Odludek”.

**The absolutely incredible “Kingdom of rust”, which was released in 2008.

***These last few sentences are some self-plagiarizing from a post I wrote back in 2020 praising “The universal want” as my favourite album of the year.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2020 list, click here.