STEEL & VELVET Orphan's Lament

Steel & Velvet’s rendition of Robbie Basho’s “Orphan’s Lament” is more than a reinterpretation it’s a resurrection. Opening their People Just Float EP, the track unfurls like a quiet invocation, merging reverence for the original with a fearless willingness to reframe it. Where Basho’s 1978 piano meditation shimmered with celestial stillness, Steel & Velvet bring it earthward, tracing the space between loss and transcendence through sound. The song also serves a dual purpose: it is both a prologue to Joshua, the protagonist of their accompanying short film, and a map of the emotional terrain the listener is about to traverse.

Romuald Ballet-Baz’s guitar work is the linchpin of this transformation. Rather than simply replicating Basho’s phrasing, he reimagines the composition’s skeleton, shaping it through intricate fingerpicking that pays homage to the master while carving out new emotional contours. Each note feels deliberate tender, spacious, and almost ritualistic. The decision to shift the piece into a lower register infuses it with weight, grounding Basho’s ethereal architecture in the grain of human experience. In that descent, Ballet-Baz finds revelation: a reminder that spirituality doesn’t always ascend; sometimes, it roots itself in the soil of sorrow.

Then there’s Johann Le Roux, whose voice gives the piece its pulse and breath. His baritone doesn’t so much sing as inhabit the lament, carrying both fragility and fortitude in every line. There’s a haunting intimacy in his phrasing the kind of restraint that says more in silence than in volume. The pairing of Ballet-Baz and Le Roux feels elemental, like two forces in dialogue: one shaping the air, the other filling it. Their interplay evokes the lineage of troubadours and mystics, yet the result is modern in its clarity and intention. Together, they transform Basho’s abstract grief into something deeply human, immediate, and cinematic.

“Orphan’s Lament,” Steel & Velvet reaffirm that reinterpretation, when done with insight, is its own form of authorship. The recording captures the fragile mechanics of performance the scrape of a string, the catch of a breath reminding us that imperfection can be divine. Far from being a nostalgic gesture, their version becomes an act of continuation, carrying Basho’s spirit into a new century with honesty and grace. It’s a work that stands quietly at the crossroads of past and present, faith and doubt, voice and silence and in that space, Steel & Velvet have created something rare: a cover that feels like revelation.

Written by Patrick