Faithfully

The synthesizer that opens this song sounds like something between a cathedral organ and a slowly turning satellite, enormous and cold and strangely tender. The tempo is glacial by the standards of the band that made it, and the arrangement strips away almost everything that made them stadium-filling — no guitar heroics, no charging rhythm section — leaving mostly atmosphere and the exposed quality of Perry's voice, which here sounds genuinely vulnerable in a way that his showier performances rarely achieved. The song is about the peculiar loneliness of being a touring musician, about the way love and absence braid themselves into something that feels permanent even when nothing about the lifestyle is. It doesn't sentimentalize that loneliness; it just describes it with unusual precision, the specific promises people make across distances they already know will test those promises. Perry's delivery in the final third, when the key modulates and he begins to really push, has the quality of someone convincing himself rather than performing for an audience. This is a song that finds its listeners at airports or in empty hotel rooms or on the other end of a long-distance phone call — wherever the gap between who you love and where you are becomes too large to hold without naming it out loud.