“Deleted Your Number” revels and explores the plethora of emotions we experience when a relationship fractures and we start breaking our ties. Some relationships endure the end of their romantic days and transform into friendships without much rancor but most affairs of the heart end with hurt feelings, misunderstanding, disloyalty, and pain. Making that entertaining for listeners, whether it’s books, movies, music, whatever, is a tall order for any performer and it’s a pleasure to hear it when they do.
Making it entertaining and still an adult experience is even more impressive. The seventeen year old talents of Aditi Iyer may seem ill-suited to this task on initial inspection. It takes her hardly any time, however, to give listeners’ convincing evidence of her versatile skills. She covers every base during this song. Iyer’s multi-faceted vocals are equipped to handle the full range of adult emotions without ever tripping over a sense of proportion. You won’t get any sense of melodrama from the performance.
The music reinforces that. It has the synthesizer driven musical backing you might expect, but some listeners may be happily surprised by the tempered and memorable tone of the arrangement. There’s nothing perfunctory about this; it’s far from a hollow vehicle for the vocal. The words aren’t either. Iyer writes about the experience of a breakup and how we cope with those changes in a way that never strains belief. She gets to the heart of what happens with details many will recall from their own lives, and it further solidifies our connection with the song.
There are no extended instrumental breaks. Her approach to the music is more orchestral rather than assigning pre-eminence to one particular instrument over the others. This integrated sound that the song achieves as a result gains even more from her obvious tailoring of the vocal. Iyer brings a far-reaching attentiveness to the writing and performance. It leaves you wanting more by the time the song ends and listeners will never feel like it repeats itself.
Nor does it ever seem to drone on even a second too long. Each section of the song embraces a fitting pace and develops its ideas with great timing. The production for “Deleted Your Number” may be its greatest quality for some. Every instrument leaps out of the speakers with immediacy, yet the production modulates things in such a way that we get a musical experience, rather loudness. It frames Iyer’s material in the best possible light.
It also sets the table for her future. She hasn’t even scratched the surface of her potential as it’s clear she can handle almost any kind of material. Her limits on her are arbitrary and/or self-imposed. You are hearing an opening up of her talents during this song, like a flowering, and it’s easy to hear her future releases will likely be even better or, at least, on par with the excellence of “Deleted Your Number”. It’s a welcome reminder of pop music’s continuing power and ability to deliver meaningful music.
Heather Savage