Today’s Song: Processing Grief in the “Moment” with Gal Musette’s Achingly Beautiful Fever Dream

Moment - Gal Musette © Alex Justice
Moment - Gal Musette © Alex Justice
This is what processing grief feels like in real time: An intimate and dreamy soundtrack to our melancholia, Gal Musette’s “Moment” captures the inescapable and all-consuming weight of loss.
 follow our Today’s Song(s) playlist

Atwood Magazine Today's Songs logo

Stream: “Moment” – Gal Musette




Gal Musette’s new single opens in a moment of raw reckoning, and never stops aching; throughout its three and a half minute run, the California singer/songwriter dwells in the visceral depths of grief and loss, taking her audience on a sonically tender, emotionally turbulent roller-coaster through life’s lows.

This is what processing grief feels like in real time: An intimate and dreamy soundtrack to our melancholia, “Moment” captures the inescapable and all-consuming weight of loss. It’s an ethereal eruption of helplessness and yearning, nostalgia and numbness, all combined and coalescing together in a turbulent, ethereal indie pop upheaval that expresses, so seamlessly, what so many of us who have experienced the death of a loved one think about on an all-too frequent basis.

Death is so final; couldn’t we just get a moment more?

Moment - Gal Musette
Moment – Gal Musette
If I had a moment to
I would say goodbye to you
If upon a moment’s whim
I could say goodbye again
The world is a forest to me
Your voice is a fallen tree
So if you said goodbye to me
I’d never hear a sound
If I had a moment more
I’d come knocking at your door
Take you out into the sun
Cancel out the damage done
But time is nothing like a clock
That you can wind, that you can block
So why use words, they hold no stock
It doesn’t matter now

Released April 7, 2023 via MOONGZR Productions, “Moment” is a poignant, bittersweet cinematic reverie. Arriving on the heals of this past February’s “Plateau” (which Atwood Magazine‘s Chloe Robinson praised for its atmospheric production, dreamy sonics, and lush, buttery vocals), Gal Musette’s second single of the year finds the singer/songwriter, born Grace Freeman, fully opening herself up to the range of emotions and ideas that flood our heads in the aftermath of tragedy.

“Moment” is up-close and personal – a heartfelt confessional expressed in the heat of the moment. “If you’re gone, you’re gone, you’re long….” Musette laments, her golden, glistening voice a soul-stirring beacon of love and longing. She soars to breathtaking heights as she despairs in the lowest of lows: “You’re long, long, long gone…

The moment wasn’t right…
The moment wasn’t right…
The moment wasn’t right…
Gal Musette © Anna Azarov
Gal Musette © Anna Azarov



Gal Musette © Anna Azarov
Gal Musette © Anna Azarov

We can feel Musette coming to terms with the finality of the situation, even as she continues to press on with the possibility of making one more memory together with her loved one. “If I had a moment to, I would say “hello” again, summon every chance I missed, relive every single kiss,” she confesses, only to resign herself to the hard truth: “But everything is ridden of you, [and] my voice is forbidden through.” What’s done is done. We don’t get second chances.

If I had a moment to
I would say “hello” again
Summon every chance I missed
Relive every single kiss
But everything is ridden of you
My voice is forbidden through
So if I said goodbye to you
It never would exist

“‘Moment’ was a song I wrote one verse for 7 years ago, but at some point I lost the paper with lyrics on it and over time almost completely forgot the melody,” Musette tells Atwood Magazine. “Years later when I experienced a significant personal loss, I was struggling to express my grief and fell into a crippling season of writer’s block. By a stroke of serendipity, the lyric reappeared on a folded piece of paper in my glove compartment which triggered a memory of the melody, and led full circle to my finishing the song and beginning to let go.”

Gal Musette © Anna Azarov
Gal Musette © Anna Azarov



Death rids us of the ones we love far too soon, and whether it was “their time to go” or not, there’s never a right time – or even a good time – to feel the stinging pain, the pure unabating emptiness, and the sheer intensity of a loved one’s absence. In “Moment,” Gal Musette creates a safe space for us to shout to the high heavens; to spill our souls, to shed our tears, to ask for things we can never have, and to feel the great cacophony of feelings we need to feel in the wake of loss. Grief is the monster that keeps giving, and “Moment” is the shelter from that never-ending storm.

Whatever you’re going through, give this enchanting song a moment of your time; finding a catharsis of her very own, Gal Musette promises to stir, comfort, and calm a weary soul.

If you’re gone, you’re gone
You’re long…
If you’re gone, you’re gone
You’re long long
Long gone

— —

:: connect with Gal Musette here ::
Stream: “Moment” – Gal Musette



— — — —

Moment - Gal Musette

Connect to Gal Musette on
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
Discover new music on Atwood Magazine
? © Alex Justice


:: Today’s Song(s) ::

Atwood Magazine Today's Songs logo

 follow our daily playlist on Spotify



:: Stream Gal Musette ::


More from Mitch Mosk
Today’s Song: “My Terracotta Heart” – Blur
he danger of being a band for over 25 years is that...
Read More