B-Side Guys

Timing can be everything in music—Eli Carvajal’s Valentine’s Day breakup anthem “Fear of Love” arrives with delicious irony, the musical equivalent of sending wilted flowers. This first single from Carvajal’s forthcoming fifth DIY album bridges geographical and emotional distances, composed in fragments between Watford isolation and Tokyo resurrection.

The production itself tells a story: recorded in Carvajal’s Tokyo bedroom using a salvaged 1970s Yamaha synthesizer from a dollar store and a secondhand drum machine acquired through Japanese Craigslist. Despite these humble origins, Grammy-award-winning Dom Shaw’s mixing and Tim Debney’s mastering elevate the sparse arrangement into something simultaneously intimate and expansive.

“Fear of Love” unfolds as a lyrical inventory, chronicling emotional states through parallel structures. The opening verses catalog a relationship’s trajectory with stark economy: “Year of love/Year of pain/Year of never enough/Year of blame.” This repetitive device could feel formulaic in less skilled hands, but Carvajal wields it to create mounting tension.

The song’s structure mirrors its bifurcated creation story—split between continents and emotional states. The shift from “Year of” to “Fear of” marks both the song’s midpoint and its emotional turning point. When Carvajal sings “Fear of kindness/Fear of cruel/Fear of crossing you/Too late,” the accumulated weight of these anxieties reveals relationship exhaustion beneath seemingly mundane concerns.

Most striking is the peculiar specificity of certain images. The line “Fear of hydrating your hydrangea/To its grave” stands out as a perfect metaphor for relational nurturing gone wrong—even acts of care can become destructive when relationships have run their course.

Vocally, Carvajal delivers these loaded lines with a restraint that belies their emotional heft, allowing the synthesizer’s warm analog tones to provide counterpoint to the clinical precision of the drum machine—technological elements reflecting the human struggle between emotional messiness and self-protective order.

What emerges is less a conventional breakup song than a meditation on how fear infiltrates love’s everyday rituals, turning coffee dates into anxious encounters and birthdays into emotional minefields. In documenting this transition from Watford desperation to Tokyo liberation, Carvajal creates something universally relatable from deeply personal circumstances—a “cry from the heart” that resonates far beyond bedroom walls.