Setting the frequency with percussive hits and a pulsing beat, MonkeyRat open their latest single, The Child with the melancholy lyrics, “I saw you again, your smile was gone, I saw you in pain…”
Anna Iachino wrote The Child as a young teenager when her dream of becoming a dancer was destroyed because of religion and culture. It’s the only poem that she managed to keep hidden for all these years, until composer and Anna’s husband, Arnold Ludvig found it and composed music for it.
MonkeyRat is a multi-genre band rooted mainly in funk, although The Child‘s frequency is in a different dimension from the band’s wider discography, leaning towards bedroom pop and neo soul.
The Child paints an intimate portrait. When asked what words were to be read on Anna’s behalf for her mother’s funeral, her poem, The Child came to mind as her mother’s mind “became like that of a child with her dementia, free at last to express herself, laughing, singing, and clapping her hands for all to hear and cheer”.
Some of the lyrical highlights of the song include the intimate “you shed a tear, I wiped it off your cheek”, the moving “you touched me, I trembled, I felt weak” and “you fell into my arms like a child would, I kissed you twice…”
The Child is MonkeyRat‘s first electronic song composed solely on Ableton Live by Arnold Ludvig and sung by up-and-coming rising star Anna Sofía Skoradal. This song is dedicated to Anna Iachino‘s mother who died from COVID.
We have added The Child to our New Music Spotlight playlist and have been immersing ourselves in MonkeyRat‘s wider discography.