music moots with Midnight ("Bless the Telephone" by Labi Siffre)

We are extremely back with Music Moots™, the blogseries where I ask someone to recommend me a song they like, and then I listen to the song and then write a little about it.

Today we have Midnight! A folk singer-songwriter in New Orleans, Midnight came to my attention when I saw she shared a bill with folk-punk troubadour A Day Without Love on his all-50-states-in-2025 tour. Midnight has a new single out, "Famine," a song whose eerie, minimal bed of banjo showcases their striking voice. Sometimes that voice gets double-tracked for a moment of emphasis, sometimes it weaves up a counter-melody, sometimes it sneaks in the background with a bit of reverb and then disappears. It feels like Midnight is a ghost haunting her own song, which fits with the song's theme of how intense deprivation can inspire even more intense desire: "I know that love grows in famine."

Midnight recommended "Bless the Telephone" by Labi Siffre. "Bless the telephone! It's one of those songs that makes you feel like you're in love -even if you never have been. Black folk artists during this time do not get enough credit - and it is especially special that the writer is queer and wrote this song about another man ! Even cooler- with TikTok and modern technology- the younger generation created a resurgence of this song- and the artist did an interview talking about how beautiful that was. I think about it often times as someone who makes music that blurs the lines of time. A good song is a good song, still, decades after the fact."

I can immediately see why this found a new life on TikTok. It's simple, but so strong in its message that it needs no adornment. Siffre's plainspoken delivery is full of sweetness. The confident finger-picking, the abbreviated length (1:28, beautiful), the blunt expression of admiration ("I'm very much in love with you"), the way Siffre plays very subtly with tempo and phrasing...the open-heartedness of the composition and performance shines through at every point.

Which means it will stand out amid Popular Internet Songs, much like a gorgeous blueberry stands out in a bowl of porridge. Not to hate on social media music as a bloc—there's much still goodness to be found, hell, a coffee shop in Minnesota sent me into a reverie when they used Alt-J's "Breezeblocks" in a latte recipe video—but in this era of Romanticizing Your Life with filtered montages, or revealing Extreme Transformations using dramatic cuts and mashups with soo much reverb, the filmmaking has the tendency to swirl into a gyre of content both overstimulating (visual) and understimulating (musical). Recently, the pleasant but rather vague Aphex Twin song "QKThr" made the Music News because it's so popular as atmospheric background music for TikToks that, as a result, Aphex Twin is getting more monthly artist YouTube plays than Taylor Swift.

Labi Siffre's song is not background music. It's too direct a statement, too pure a delivery. It's not vague at all! I did a brief scan of the most popular videos using it and it's all people engaging directly with the lyrics: missing someone, loving someone, being excited to talk to someone on the phone. I hope the new popularity of the song inspires people to write more songs with such simplicity and sincerity. Bless "Bless The Telephone"!

Thank you Midnight! Listen to their new single "Famine" here.

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