Ireland: Lesley Roy – Maps

Felix: That’s how you ruin a song – a tutorial.

Step one: Write a song that’s actually good. That’s necessary to enable the meaning of “ruining”. Plan a music video with beautiful landscapes and nature.
Step two: Speed up your song to a ridiculous BPM.
Step three: Choose a singer who ideally needs autotune, because autotune is the sound of 2021!
Step four: Even if the singer doesn’t need autotune, overuse it anyway. It’s modern.
Step five: Do whatever you can to make the vocals sound even less natural. After all, the nature in the planned music video might jeopardise our quest to ruin our song, and that’s our project here. We need more ruining!
Step six: Finally it’s time for the video. So: Make your singer run aimlessly and totally stressed through the landscape. It needs to look like she’s lost at a massive public transport hub and keeps missing one bus after another.

Good, Ireland, thanks for following our tutorial! 

Now seriously. This is so sad, because “Maps” is a good composition at its core. It’s just too hectic, and sounds way too artificial.

If the colour of Lesley’s voice is more natural and pleasant when she sings it live, I might be able to enjoy it.

Shi: “Maps” is a great song to listen to on a long car ride, but while maps can definitely help you out when you’ve lost your way during said ride, “Maps” will not save Ireland from being lost in its semi.

Martin: Yeah, I worry about this one too. As a song, it feels more suited to Lesley as a person than “Story Of My Life” did last year, but I’m concerned about her live vocals and – as always – the Irish ability to mess up the staging. Fingers crossed all three of us are wrong…

video and title image source: eurovision.tv