Steel & Velvet’s Orphan’s Lament opens like the memory of a voice carried on wind: fragile, human, and immeasurably alone. The song, first penned and performed by Robbie Basho in 1978, is here reborn as the first chapter of People Just Float, the band’s forthcoming EP and short film. It’s a beginning that does not rush to declare itself. Instead, it lingers, each note a hesitant breath between loss and endurance.
What distinguishes this interpretation is its groundedness. Where Basho’s piano gazed upward, toward the celestial, Steel & Velvet’s guitar looks down into soil, into the weight of footsteps that never returned. Guitarist Romuald Ballet-Baz shapes the song’s spine through delicate fingerpicking, letting the notes ripple like light through autumn branches. There’s tenderness in his phrasing, yet also restraint; he plays not to impress but to confess.
Then comes Johann Le Roux’s voice: earth-warmed and steady, yet carrying an ache that refuses to fade. His tone doesn’t dramatize sorrow; it accepts it, the way one learns to live beside absence. The lowered key lends gravity to that acceptance, pulling the melody closer to the human pulse. You can almost hear the air between phrases, as though the song itself needs space to remember.
Steel & Velvet are known for their minimalist aesthetic, unamplified performances, stripped-back arrangements, and a preference for intimacy over spectacle. This philosophy finds its fullest expression here. Every element serves the song’s story: the loneliness of Joshua, the film’s wandering protagonist, mirrors the quiet yearning in the music.
Their collaboration with director Loïc Moyou turns this soundscape into imagery: a hunter, a forest, a found companion; scenes that whisper rather than shout. The visual and sonic worlds entwine, making Orphan’s Lament feel less like a cover and more like a lived moment, a fragment of cinema that hums.
Steel & Velvet have always gravitated toward the raw and the real, echoing the spirit of Johnny Cash’s American Recordings and the introspective honesty of Mark Lanegan. Yet in Orphan’s Lament, they find their own territory: a folk terrain where silence holds equal weight to sound.
There’s something profoundly human about this rendition. It doesn’t seek closure, only communion: with the past, with the listener, with the vastness between. You’re left with a rare stillness: the kind that feels like remembering someone you never met, but somehow miss..
