Leo Sawikin isn’t the kind of name you will have heard… yet. He’s a folk-rock singer on the verge of hitting the big time, and it’s with his most recent release, ‘A Whole World Waiting’ that he proves he is worthy of the slow-but-steady hype build.
We’re not quite sure what “it” is, but Sawikin’s just got it, hasn’t he? It’s probably a combination of that hypnotic voice, those compelling lyrics, that ever-evolving and unexpected chord pattern… it just all rolls together to say “star in the making”.
Writing about his own mental health issue has led Leo to create some of the most authentic songs we’ve heard in a long time; ‘A Whole World Waiting’ might just be the most real of them all.
“The song reflects this feeling that you’ve missed out on the best the world has to offer, and just the pervading sense that things are getting more difficult in the world – and every attending emotion that goes along with it,” Leo adds. “It’s kind of like letting go of that and trying to figure out what you do after everything falls apart. When I wrote these songs, they were about the way my friends and I were thinking, that the world we think we have is not going to last long. We were thinking more in terms of issues like climate change or the political divisiveness, but the pandemic, which none of us expected, gives the songs more power. We’re already starting to live that new reality where you can’t turn your back for a second. In the old world, we could distract ourselves with our day to day lives, but now we’re forced to stare down just how fragile everything is.”
There you go, from the mouth of the horse. This is a song about what comes after despair, panic. What happens when you start to pick up the pieces and put it all back together. Couldn’t have come at a better time, really, could it?
