Moira Smiley and VOCO’s “The Call” Says Stay Strong in Shared Humanity (premiere)

Solemnity rings through the breathtakingly wordless introduction to “The Call”, the new a cappella single taken from Moira Smiley and VOCO’s upcoming album In Our Voices. Composed by Gregory Fletcher, “The Call” comes with a video poignant in its simplicity as moving images of the digital are interspersed with those of the natural and the human. A dancer’s body bridges the gap with cybernetic adornments and robotic movements. Fletcher’s voice intertwines with fellow VOCO singer Jake Asaro’s in intimate harmonies over the starry breaths and backing vocables of Moira Smiley, Dawn Pemberton, and Karla Mundy.

“This song is a plea to stay strong in our shared humanity,” says Fletcher, “against the screaming voices of division – a plea for oneness as the United States exercises its essential identity as a democracy on 3 November.”

Fletcher’s careful lyrics underscore this hope – “Our feet, one and the same / Brothers by a different name” – and serve as a reminder of how the choices we make have existential repercussions for our world and the people with whom we share it, none of whom are as distant from us in experience as a polarized, factionalized social order would have us believe. The song “calls us away from the inherited instinct to ‘other’,” Fletcher continues. “It asks us to heed all that we share as humans on this single, finite planet and to act against the destructive behaviors and systems that affect us all.”

As high-stakes decisions loom, whether in voting booths or simply in the form of the day-to-day choices we make about our fellow beings, Fletcher and VOCO’s message is one to take to heart and keep there, to hold with the same tender care found in each sonorous second of “The Call”.

“The Call” is available as a single on 6 November as a
Bandcamp Friday exclusive. In Our Voices is available 12 February 2021.