Listen to This: Emily Elbert, "God is Change"

Emily Elbert – “God is Change” (Metropolitan Groove Merchants)

Turns out when the hills go up in flames, some folks make ash into alchemy. Emily Elbert’s “God is Change” doesn’t so much rise from the rubble as it hums somewhere beneath it—an invocation more than a pop song, swirling in the sun-scorched haze where Brittany Howard meets a shoeless Sade doing meditation breathwork. It’s Elbert’s grief hymn, sure, but also her groove gospel: a low-slung, soul-psychedelic shimmer shot through with Octavia Butler’s cosmic realism and the kind of surrender that only comes after watching everything familiar turn to cinder. What else can ya do?

Photo: Shervin Lainez

Written in the before-times (she didn’t know how close those flames were), the song flirts with premonition: “feed my form into the flame, knowing I’ll be born again” she sings, casually prophetess-like. There’s no moralizing here—just an invitation to dissolve and dance.

As usual, Elbert’s guitar phrasing is so fluid it might’ve grown roots, and her voice hovers somewhere between intimate confession and celestial guide. You don’t listen to this one, somehow it listens to you.

File under: post-tragedy psalms that you can groove to. Listen twice.