London’s Fiona Amaka has covered a lot of ground since 2023, when “Anyway you come” was first recorded. Listeners who’ve followed her more recent run – the soulful indie-rock of “No Daylight” and “Cowards and Shadows,” the spiritually-inflected “Honesty (Psalm 139),” the chirpy “Desert Flower,” and the orchestral folk reimagining of “Love That Fills My World” earlier this year – are catching this earlier song in a kind of retrospective light, seeing where the throughline that defines her now actually started.
“Anyway you come” came out of a difficult period: Fiona’s mother had been diagnosed with a terminal illness the year before, and the song captures a specific, hard-won realization – that when faced with losing someone you can’t imagine life without, you find yourself willing to support whatever version of that person remains, as long as they’re still here. It’s never had a real promotional push, quietly picked up by listeners who discovered it after streaming her other work, and it’s overdue for wider attention.
Her signature soulful vocals were just as good here in 2023 as they are now. The clear evolution is in the accompaniment – I think in the latest releases it suits her character better, though this is still excellent. “Anyway you come” carries the gentler, more stripped-back arrangement that fits a singer-songwriter ballad of this weight, letting the vocal performance do most of the emotional work without much else competing for space. It’s a quieter, more raw version of the artist than the rock-leaning singles that followed, which makes sense given what she was processing at the time.
Hearing “Anyway you come” now, after the rest of her catalog, gives the song an extra layer of context – you can hear an artist still finding the exact shape of her sound, with the voice and the honesty already fully formed. That’s often how the best discographies work: not a sudden arrival, but a steady refinement of something that was true from the start. This one deserves to find the audience it’s been missing.
