I quit ballet when I was nineteen. I told myself I was being practical and the girls who kept going were blistering their feet for nothing. Four years of business school later, I was still pretending I didn’t miss the studio. And then I went to see a company perform at the Civic and watched a girl in the corps hold an arabesque so long it was genuinely fucking unfair. I was booking drop-in classes the next morning like I’d never left. Something had been sitting in me the whole time, patient as hell, and it didn’t give a shit how many business courses I took. Chris Red spent years building a corporate life around the music he couldn’t actually leave behind, and ‘Something Calling’ is what happens when you finally stop lying to yourself about what owns you.
Chris opens the track with piano that sits right at the front of the mix and just stays there, holding its ground while the beat builds underneath it with enough low-end pull to make you actually pay attention. Then Eylie comes in and the whole thing shifts. Her voice has this clarity to it that makes you feel like she’s talking directly at you and that is a goddamn skill that most vocalists spend their whole careers chasing and never actually find. The intimacy she brings to this production is doing serious heavy lifting, and honestly it’s a little unfair how fucking effortless she makes it sound.
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The first verse drops you straight into it. “Late nights, secret hum / Playing chords I’ve never / There’s a frequency I chase / Something pulling through the bass / Won’t sleep, won’t stop / Every note feels like / Sonic whispers in my ear / Saying come back.” That whole verse is the anatomy of an obsession that’s already won. He’s awake at the wrong hour and the music has already answered for him. The pull has been there the whole time and he’s stopped fighting it which if I’m being honest is the most fucking relatable thing I’ve heard in a minute.
The pre-chorus is two lines and it does more emotional work than most full verses. After all that scene-setting, Eylie pulls back to deliver them like she’s telling you a secret: “I don’t know what this is / But I can’t resist.” The restraint in how she sings it is what makes it land so goddamn hard. Two lines that say everything about being pulled toward something you can’t explain and have stopped trying to.
The chorus opens up and Chris lets everything breathe with that choir coming in underneath Eylie like the song just got bigger than one person’s story. “Something calling through the magic / Feels so real but I can’t have it / Lost between the sound and silence / Can’t ignore it anymore.” That chorus wrecks me because Chris managed to put into words the feeling of wanting something you can’t quite reach and not being able to walk away from it either yet somehow that gap is where you keep choosing to live.
The second verse is where the fixation takes over completely. “3 AM empty room / Chasing echoes / Every sample holds a voice / Like I never had a choice / Forget my name forget to eat / All the feelings incomplete / Forget the world when it breaks / There’s a truth I can’t escape.” The moment he forgets his own name is the moment you understand how deep this goes. Everything else just falls away and he’s stopped caring that it has. Eylie delivers these lines with a quiet and building intensity that makes you feel the full weight of what it costs to be that far gone, and she does it without asking for a single drop of your sympathy. That’s a fucking skill.
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Producer Chris Red is a Stockholm-based singer, guitarist, songwriter, and producer who took the scenic route back to the thing he was clearly never done with. After studying music production at SAE, he chased the studio life, realized the money was not exactly raining down, and built a corporate career instead. But music kept its claws in him. He played session guitar for Bosson, traveled the world, soaked up concerts from Ed Sheeran to The Script to the Avicii Tribute, and eventually turned all that restless inspiration into new songs. Now he’s putting them out with the kind of grown-man clarity that only comes from living a whole damn life before stepping back into the spotlight.
The real heat on this track comes courtesy of vocals from Eylie – a Swedish-Lebanese singer-songwriter with the kind of voice that makes heartbreak sound hot and a little dangerous. She first caught attention with ‘Singing Without You,’ a raw piano ballad written after losing her father to cancer and that emotional honesty still sits underneath everything she touches. On Chris Red’s ‘Something Calling’ she brings glossy pop vocals with real feminine heat that makes the track feel intimate before you even realize it has its hands on you. She’s sultry and quietly intense with enough ache in her delivery to make vulnerability feel like a fucking power move.
I never stuck with the drop-in classes. Went maybe six times, got busy, let it slide. But something shifted anyway, and I stopped pretending the pull wasn’t there. That’s the whole truth Chris Red and Eylie are sitting on with ‘Something Calling.’ You can build a whole life around the thing that owns you and it will wait. It’s not going anywhere. And one day you’ll stop lying about it the way Chris did and the way I did in that studio doorway at 8am on a Tuesday with nowhere better to be. The song tells the truth about what it feels like to finally stop running from it, and that’s enough.
