Fire Away

"Fire Away" is the Traveller track where Stapleton's blues-rock instincts and his tenderness meet head-on. It builds slowly from clean guitar arpeggios and organ into a full-band swell, Cobb's production letting the drums arrive late and hit with real weight so the last chorus lands like a door being kicked. The vocal moves from a near-whisper to a full-throated roar within a single verse, and the roughness in his upper register — the note that tears rather than rings — is the entire emotional argument. The lyric puts him in front of a partner in the middle of a fight, telling her to take her best shot, that he can take whatever she throws because he isn't leaving. It's a devotion song written as an invitation to be wounded. The music video, which follows a woman's mental illness to her suicide, permanently recast the song as being about loving someone through an illness that will win, and audiences hear that reading now whether or not the lyric requires it. Morgane's harmony again functions as the presence being sung to. Best heard loud, late, when you're bracing to say something true to someone you don't want to lose.