Some songs take time to percolate into you; others sear themselves much quicker. Starling by Elles Bailey is the latter. It is newly released, yet I already know it will be one of those songs that will accompany me for life. Starling closes Bailey’s excellent Can’t Take My Story Away, an album that somehow improves not just listen by listen, but song by song. By the time this final track arrives, it feels less like a conclusion than an emotional reckoning. It is a song of such aching authenticity that it almost feels intrusive to listen to at times.
Bailey has always had one of the most distinctive voices around: equal parts grit and tenderness. Like an angel on forty a day. That voice carries Starling perfectly because the song itself lives in that same tension between beauty and damage.
Written in response to the suicide of a friend, Starling never attempts easy explanation. Instead, it inhabits the confusion grief leaves behind. “There are no flowers to capture the beauty you were / There are no poems or songs to convey how it hurt.” The brilliance of these lines lies partly in their helplessness. The song knows language will fail and reaches for it anyway.
The imagery throughout is full of sky and movement. Birds, stars, wind, flight. “I’ll call you starling / Fly with the wind / Now it’s calling you home.” In another songwriter’s hands, those metaphors might drift towards sentimentality. Bailey anchors them in memory and pain: “I remember the fear / I remember the darkness / I remember the pain / That tore open your heart.”
And then comes the line that completely undoes me, “I remember your tears / But, girl, I remember your laughter.”
It is devastating because it refuses to let suffering become the whole story of a person’s life. The song remembers joy, too. The warmth of someone alongside the hurt they carried.
Suicide leaves behind a particular kind of silence. Even now, despite how many lives it touches, people often struggle to talk openly about it. Most of us will know somebody who has stood close to that darkness, whether we speak about it publicly or not. Songs like Starling matter because they gently push against that silence. Not by preaching or simplifying, but by offering compassion and remembrance.
There is a quiet line running through the song about misunderstanding, “The night tells a story better than I ever could / I misunderstood.” That feels painfully true to grief too: the endless revisiting of conversations, signs and moments; the wish that we might somehow have understood more, or sooner. Yet by the song’s close, Bailey seems to arrive at something like acceptance. “You were searching for freedom / Now I understand” is not resolution, exactly, but an attempt at compassion even in the aftermath of unbearable loss.
Musically, the closing passage is extraordinary. The song slowly gathers itself into a huge emotional swell led by strings and a mournful cello line that seems to mimic the murmuration of starlings turning across the evening sky. Piano, strings and voice build together until the repeated refrain of “dreaming of you” feels almost overwhelming. Not catharsis exactly, but release.
The song is also a reminder that sometimes light can be found through the eyes of another. If Starling understands anything, it is the importance of reaching beyond silence and towards connection. There is real power in talking, in listening and in reminding people that they do not have to carry darkness alone.
The older I get, the more I think the best songs are not necessarily the cleverest ones. They are the songs that tell difficult truths with enough honesty that listeners can place their own lives quietly inside them. Starling does exactly that. It is heartbroken, beautiful and profoundly human.
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