Charlie Brown

Brown had worked as a songwriter before the 2013 solo breakthrough, and that experience is audible in the way On My Way gives its central phrase room to grow. Released through All Around the World, the song reached the UK top ten. It also received a broad set of alternate treatments, with MNEK, the Mike Delinquent Project and LMC among the names attached to the release. A direct pop song could therefore move through different rhythmic settings without losing its central line.

The live work developed alongside the record. In a contemporary interview, Brown described touring with Dappy and Craig David as a new kind of education after smaller industry performances. That change of scale matters for a singer whose material depends on making a chorus feel addressed to the people in front of him, rather than simply delivering a technically complete vocal.

Floodgates followed in 2013. Brown explained in his own interviews that he wanted to write about the pressure of keeping feelings contained, while leaving enough space for listeners to connect the song to their own experience. It is a useful description of his early pop writing: specific in its emotional direction, open in the circumstances a listener might bring to it. The Royal Albert Hall’s archive records him performing both On My Way and Floodgates at the July 2013 Rays of Sunshine concert. Those two songs form a concise portrait of the period, with the first recording’s forward motion answered by the second’s need for release. The story sits in those performances and singles, where the writing can be heard moving from the private room towards a much larger one.