After a long year of playing musical chairs – Sol went back to Buenos Aires, Charlie went back to New York – the time is finally right to present their collaborative EP, ‘Waiting’. A word – ‘collaborative’ – that carries more than meets the eye, since the album started with Charlie a.k.a. Électriciennes and Henry Franci, Sol’s father, going over a trove of unfinished material. The two agreed that there was some gold in those demos, but with Charlie in Shanghai, Henry in Buenos Aires and Sol about to embark on a year long residence in New York, the timing didn’t precisely scream ‘let’s do this now’. But ‘now’ – or rather ‘then’ – they did, working frantically to wrap up the recording sessions the very day that Sol was flying to New York.

‘Waiting’ was easy – or at least easier – as the trio had demoed that song years ago for a television show that never materialized, and Sol was familiar with it. The story, told from the point of view of a waitress infatuated with a regular patron who may or may not reciprocate her feelings, raises to climatic highs in a powerful chorus. ‘When I Look At You’ is another torch song – a melodic idea that Henry shared with Charlie who immediately heard the potential. The lyrics – rather affected by a recent watching of the movie ‘Marriage Story’ – are among the most poignant that Charlie has written.

The numbness of this fighting, too, and the quiet voices in the other room. When the choice of a better life, somehow, is lost to us.

Two such intense songs needed a lighter counterpart. Enter ‘Biding Time’, a bouncy, rather cheeky song about the confidence of youth. The track emerged several orders of magnitude better thanks to Henry’s Spanish guitar chops, which add a Latin flair to the composition. And thus, the collaboration of a team across generations, continents and time zones, yielded a solid album that one can only hope is only the first of more music to come.