‘Gone’ is the prelude to a new year, a moment of new beginnings and of closure from the past. This process, which often proves more difficult than expected, is the theme of ELI’s new single, on which he manages to combine light sound with heavy emotions.
Again and again, he demonstrates how thin the line between healing and self-destruction can be in a relationship. A toxic relationship and overwhelming emotions were what led the multi-instrumentalist to create this song.
On ‘Gone’, ELI creates a snapshot of sorts of his emotional state shortly after his breakup. A feeling of devastation and rage, combined with an irresistible longing to get back together. Unable to live either with or without the other person, yet the search for a compromise seems hopeless. In lines like “It’s like you know it hurts so you go there, fucked up that you don’t care” ELI describes how there can be no vulnerability without trust, and that as the level of commitment increases, so too does the void and the despair after the breakup.
While writing this track together with Neil Ormandy (Say You Won’t Let Go – James Arthur) and Martin Wave, ELI allowed himself to be intuitively guided by all of the powerful emotions going through his head at the time. From today’s perspective, he says: “There are some things that I now see slightly differently, but at the time I was so much in the grip of these emotions that I couldn’t have written this song any other way, and that’s okay.”
