Matthew Herbert Turns Pain Into a Party On This Remix of Lianne La Havas’ "Lost and Found"

In 2012, London-based singer/songwriter Lianne La Havas released a fantastic single, “Lost & Found,” that later found its way to her debut album, Is Your Love Big Enough. It was a wrenching and powerful introductory statement, a sober assessment of a failed relationship with a chorus that laid her trauma bare: “You broke me and taught me to truly hate myself.” The stately arrangement, featuring mostly piano and acoustic guitar, made the song feel like a moment of reflection, a look back at a darker time from a place of relative calm.

Fast-forward almost four years to this track, the new Matthew Herbert remix of the song, which leads off the first compilation from DJ Koze’s Pampa label. Herbert adds his trademark crunchy house beat and a room-shaking bassline, speeding up the piano part and compressing it into a starburst trill. By turning this song of pain into a party, he finds something new in it that turned out to be there all along. “When I felt strong enough I was discovered by the love I had been waiting for so long,” goes one key line, and Herbert’s mix puts us squarely in the middle of that moment, seeing the hurt in the distance and the salvation in the same frame. Pop is a meeting ground for opposing forces: desire and loss, longing and bliss, joy and sadness, pleasure and pain. Brilliant songs like this one take contradictory feelings and swirl them around, allowing them to amplify each other for three or four minutes at a time.

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