I’m slowly realizing that I have a soft spot for a very particular kind of British songwriter, the kind whose work feels intimate and handmade, and Luke Sital-Singh is for me, the finest among them. I can’t remember exactly when I first stumbled into his music. It must have been more than four years ago because I don’t have any memory of listening to him before that. It’s been long enough that the details have been lost to whatever ether memories dissolve into when they fade. But as I try to look back and trace this path, I realize that the origin doesn’t matter to me at all. What matters is that I found his music, and that it’s slowly come to dominate my general playlists.
There’s a particular feeling to Luke’s songs that I’ve never quite been able to name. His songs were clearly crafted with an abundance of care and effort, and it shows 1. It’s rare to find something so distinctive in the middle an endless ocean. His work stands apart in a way that feels oddly personal, almost private, like something made with exactly my emotional temperament in mind. I don’t know how to explain it except to say that it sounds like the music I would make, if I ever tried. I know that it sounds really strange and maybe presumptuous to say that someone else’s art feels like a version of the art I would have made. But I don’t mean this as a comparison or a claim. It’s more that his music feels like a path my mind already knew, long before I ever heard it sung. As if he somehow wrote down feelings I’ve had for years and set them to melodies I didn’t know that I was waiting for.
I’ve always been the sort of person who gets anxious easily, the kind who can often feel overwhelmed by life in general. Luke’s music also has this grounding quality, a softness to the melodies and steadiness to the rhythms that quiets me in a way that other music simply doesn’t. Even when he’s singing about heartbreak or uncertainty, there’s a peace in the way he moulds the sadness. It’s as if he’s holding it gently rather than fighting it. There’s much sorrow in his songs, yes, but it’s rarely loud. Rather, it’s a muted sadness that’s threaded with a thin, persistent light and an undercurrent of hope that you can sense but not hold. There’s also beauty, earnestness and unmistakeable courage in the way he sings of love in tracks like I Do.
Dressing Like A Stranger
Of all the music Luke Sital-Singh has released, Dressing Like a Stranger is the album I’ve been looping almost without pause since the start of 2025, which is curious because this year has been unusually kind to me. It’s maybe the first time in my adult life that I’ve felt like I’m no longer operating in that old survival mode shaped by a childhood that left me burnt out for more than a decade afterward. And now that the dust has finally settled and I’ve started looking at myself more clearly, it’s almost as if I’m meeting a version of me I’ve never properly seen before. There’s something both unsettling and vulnerable about that, and maybe that’s why this album has followed me so faithfully these past months. To me, Dressing Like a Stranger feels like it’s pondering the same questions I’m carrying around in my head: Who am I now? What do I do with the parts of myself I don’t immediately recognize? How do I grow into someone new without feeling like I’m losing something essential?
And it is indeed with this thought that the first track of the album opens.
I’ve been walking through my mind this morning
But I don’t recognize these winding roads
All the buildings feel small and there’s nobody in them
Is there no hope at all of getting home?
I’ve definitely had mornings on which I’ve observed my own thoughts like that of a strangers’. To me, the buildings are patterns of thought or the places that the mind usually sits in during day to day thinking, and the winding roads the path it takes to get there.
The album then looks up from the self and outward to our divided, increasingly volatile world in Blind Missiles.
For me, the song stirs up memories of the political storms that surrounded the recent American elections. People drifting apart in an instant, the world “beautifully lying,” like a “painting with the canvas showing through”. While many of the debates and fights are deeply serious and deserving of attention, it felt impossibly violent and chaotic to be swept into the center of a conflict that wasn’t mine. Especially at a time when I was still trying to understand my own place in the world. Social media tends to carry the loudest, most incendiary voices across oceans and drop them into everyone’s endless content feeds while the reasonable voices tend to fade into the background. It reminded me of something I once read: that humans evolved in small communities where we were only meant to know of the happenings in our immediate surroundings, not to absorb a constant stream of global outrage every time we picked up our phones 2. I think we’ve created a world full of noise, a world where anyone can fire off “blind missiles”. And many like me are left trying to make sense of where they fit, left hoping that these blind missiles don’t reach them.
Over the next three songs, the album traces the shape of love as it stretches, stabilizes, and sometimes breaks.
California captures the chaos and ache of waiting when you’re in one place and the person you love is somewhere else. You create plans of meeting up (meet you back here someday after the storm) that are both special and mundane (saved a spot beyond the crowded parking lot).
Rather Be feels like a contented reflection that follows, sung perhaps right after the reunion. There’s tenderness in the way he describes simply being together again, but also a quiet longing for that peace to last a little longer. It also speaks of the hopes and dreams of a couple that’s waiting for some milestones so that they can celebrate. Perhaps they can’t celebrate while they’re “holding out for a pay raise”.
Can’t Get High tilts everything sideways. It reads like a post-breakup song sung to himself during the chaotic middle of moving out. Opening boxes, packing books, replaying conversations about “letting go,” yet knowing he isn’t ready to.
It’s a story in three parts: anticipation, reunion and unravelling.
Me & God turns inward again, and talks of a relationship with god. There’s poignant imagery about the complexity of this relationship, hesitation, joy, guilt and a little hope. But more than that there’s a sense that he’s feeling weighed down by the world (“There’s just so much I’ll never understand”) and seeking some comfort in his relationship with god but it’s not quite helping him (“He still won’t carry the weight of the world”). While I’m not religious, this song still speaks to me as I’ve had similar feelings of being overwhelmed and hoping for some external force to come along and solve my problems.
After those early songs about longing and separation, the album then traverses the emotional terrain of long term love.
All Night Stand feels like a portrait of the steadiness of a long relationship that makes you feel both lucky and deeply known. There’s a sense of returning to something familiar and comforting, even as he admits to moments of uncertainty or restlessness (“tell me a lie… the truth is out on the line”). The nostalgia of pretending to be young again is blended with the gratitude of waking beside someone whose presence feels like home.
Summer Somewhere is reassurance sung to a lover who’s worn down and afraid. It feels like a reminder that the world isn’t as bleak as it seems in their darkest moments; a gentle encouragement to aim a little higher, to sing a little sweeter, and to trust that they’re not alone in their fears. That it’s still “Summer Somewhere”.
Forever Endeavor is a meditation on being married, the “forever endeavor” that is equal parts tenderness, fear and hard-won resilience. It sings of the terror of loss and the beauty of choosing each other anyway while ackowledging the scars and questions and the courage of loving someone for a lifetime.
Finally, Wiser Too turns inward again. It feels as if Luke is speaking to a younger version of himself. Someone who was scared, wearing masks, trying to make sense of voices that crack and fade. The song offers reassurance that heartbreak is inevitable, but survivable, and that in the end he’ll stand in the same place his younger self once stood, a little stronger, maybe even a little wiser too.
The album ends with a zoomed out, contemplative piece The Walk that feels part self-reassurance, part love song. It turns life itself into a kind of trembling tightrope — “a tight rope swinging / from the past, high in the trees” — whose destination is “obscured by all the leaves.” Apt, as it does feel like it’s hard to balance everything as you go through life sometimes. There’s a lot of honesty in the way he admits unsteadiness, wondering aloud, “If I fall who will catch me?” and looking toward the imagined “tight rope dancers” who’ve walked this path before him with a grace he doesn’t feel he possesses. Read another way, it also feels like a reflection on walking that path together as a couple or even as a family. The storm clouds gather, the rope sways, he’s “not yet half way over” and afraid. But then he thinks he hears a familiar step close behind him, and that’s enough. “I will walk if you walk with me.”
As melancholic as many of these songs are, I hear optimism threaded through the way Luke sings, a brightness that flickers but never quite goes out. Like him, I’m generally a bit of a “grumpy guy”1, and maybe I feel a sense of comfort in hearing someone else hold the world with that same mix of weariness and tenderness. Or maybe I resonate with it because we’ve lived through some similar seasons at similar points in our lives. Or maybe the music speaks to me because I’m finally looking at myself properly after a very long time, and listening to this album feels a little like walking those unfamiliar roads in my own mind again, observing how the landscape has shifted and pondering self-identity.
I’ve been moved by many songs and books over the years, but this is the first time I’ve felt compelled to sit with an entire album of music, engage deeply, write about it, and try to understand why it stirs me the way it does. I’m grateful for artists like Luke Sital-Singh who work through immense challenges to bring their music into the world, and I hope he keeps making it for as long as he can. Listening to him reminds me that I, too, should make things that are simply “for me” and let them exist out in the world without apology.
I hope to hear him sing in person someday but I’ve never seen a tour date in Asia 3. But I’ll keep hoping.
Footnotes
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“Luke Sital-Singh.” Greenbelt, https://www.greenbelt.org.uk/artists/luke-sital-singh/. Accessed 9 Dec. 2025. ↩ ↩2
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Lim, Amy J., and Edison Tan. “Social media ills and evolutionary mismatches: A conceptual framework.” Evolutionary Psychological Science 10.3 (2024): 212-235. ↩
Correspondence
Reader Comments & Discussion
I loved the way you expressed your thoughts about each song. It's as if you slowed down in time inward, like a poet expressing their feelings to the world.
I hope the artist will tour Asia, and you may get the opportunity to listen in person. Thanks for the write-up, as it introduced me to the artist.
For sure, I will listen to his songs and albums ✨
So beautifully and tenderly expressed, Ashwin! Just like his music :)
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