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CollideLeona Lewis

This could be huge via @samlansky (Leona Lewis - Collide):

There’s a lot riding against Leona Lewis with the release of her first single: She has a (deserved) reputation for being rather boring and stiff; Her sophomore album, 2009’s Echo, underperformed both critically and commercially; and even before it was released, rumors were circulating around a possible issue of illegal sampling or crediting with the instrumental of “Collide.” (These issues remain unresolved, but they don’t really concern me, and I don’t really care if and how they’re ever resolved unless it interferes with the global release of “Collide,” which has a pretty good chance of being a massive summer smash.)

Because “Collide” is completely amazing.

Reasons why it is amazing include the following: It is a dance song, but it’s a dance song in a pleasantly adult-contemporary-pop-rock way rather than in an aggressive deafening Black Eyed Peas way; There are some fuzzy, lo-fi pre-chorus pieces with hyper-processed vocals, but that doesn’t feel awful and robotic; the song seems to have about three choruses (which aligns it nicely with the work of, for example, Girls Aloud, in that vein of unselfconscious structural experimentation), but the “real chorus,” to the greatest extent that there is one, doesn’t start until 1:47 (at which point the song is nearly half over), which makes the song feel so painfully brief that you simply must start it over again as soon as it’s ended; the lyrics are, simply, gorgeous; Leona said that the song is about “a summer romance, meeting someone and feeling an instant chemistry,” which may not inspire a whole lot of personal epiphanies for most of us but, to me, feels like a very lovely and poignant sentiment that’s evoked with remarkable precision in the song.

I loved “Happy” when it was first released, and then with time, it began to feel kind of stiff and turgid. “Happy” is also an incredibly straightforward song, and “Collide” is not. “Collide” is big and sad-jubilant like a Robyn song and experimental in the way that a lot of Truly Great Pop is, in that it could serve as perfectly normal background music to a grimly mediocre Kate Hudson romantic comedy (maybe during a climactic chase sequence?) but when you really sit down and listen to it with the care and caution that the song deserves (but never demand), you get a good sense of how buoyant and layered it really is.

And that’s why the new Leona Lewis single is fantastic.

Source: samlansky