B-Side Guys

Fifty seconds of acoustic guitar and foot drums before a single word. Luke Bakken makes you wait for it, and when that husky rasp finally arrives, it lands like a confession you weren’t sure you were ready to hear. “A Deeper Light” is a slow-build folk rock track stripped to its barest elements (one guy, one guitar, feet keeping time), and the minimalism isn’t a limitation. It’s the whole point.

The lyrics read like a series of negotiations with someone who’s already halfway out the door. “Can we drop all our differences / Will you pull me out of the pit” opens with vulnerability before the song even finds its footing, and Bakken keeps stacking questions on top of each other like he knows he won’t get answers to most of them. The best line here is the most reckless one: “I would dive right off a cliff / If it gave us a minute alone.” It’s desperate in a way that doesn’t ask for your sympathy, just your attention.

What saves the song from wallowing is its structure. Bakken builds patiently, layering intensity without adding much instrumentation, letting his voice do the escalating. By the time he arrives at “You can pour your heart and soul out to me,” the invitation feels earned precisely because he spent the entire song baring his own first. The shift from “Can I bare my heart and soul to you” to that final reciprocal offer is subtle, but it reframes everything before it.

There’s an honesty in the one-man-band approach that studio polish would have killed. Some songs need rough edges to breathe.