Writing of single ‘Home, Home’ back in 2021, we described how the music of Aidan Belo’s His His “blended […] melancholy and nostalgia into something searching and fond.” The track was representative of the Toronto-based artist’s recent output. Belo moved back to his family farm during the initial stages of the pandemic and (re)connected with the simplicity of rural living. A change which precipitated not only his earnest folk style but also the wider considerations of both the past and the future. ‘Home, Home’ held “the present as a kind of intersection” between these two forces as we put it at the time, “Belo’s prior experiences informing the dreams of what might come next.”
His His has now returned with a brand new single, ‘West Coast’, a track no less tender and considered, and no less focused on what might lie ahead. Written while stuck on the east coast and pining for the west, the track adopts a quietly ethereal tone. A small daydream where one’s wishes are allowed to drift to the surface, and longing is permitted to express its true form. “I want to be somebody living there on the West Coast,” Belo sings, the details of the fantasy receding in favour of their general sentiment. “I’ll get a house down by the beach somewhere, in some town, I don’t care.” There might be melancholy in distance or the difficulty of achieving such a thing, but there is comfort at least in allowing the wish into the world, hope manifest as a tangible thing.
