Harry Kappen doesn’t write songs to make you comfortable. He writes them to make you feel, and “The Longing,” the opening track on his new album FOUR, is the kind of song that doesn’t let you sit still inside your own skin. It digs, prods, pushes. It’s a rock track built like a psychological brick wall — not something you casually walk around, but something you collide with until you understand why it’s there.
The song starts in the quiet, where many of Kappen’s best instincts live. A vulnerable acoustic guitar, stripped bare and unpretentious, sets the tone. His voice enters like a confession delivered at 2 a.m., soft but weighted. “Sometimes my brain’s on fire,” he sings, and it doesn’t sound like poetry. It sounds like a man telling the truth. Immediately, Kappen builds a world where logic and longing wrestle for dominance, and the listener is placed in the middle of that struggle.
Then comes the guitar solo, the centerpiece of the track. It doesn’t grandstand, and it doesn’t need to. It rises organically from the song’s emotional architecture, bending notes like someone bending their own truth until it no longer breaks them. The solo speaks the part of the story the lyrics can’t articulate, and that’s the mark of a rock musician who understands the heart’s language better than the mind’s.
Kappen’s influences drift through the background like radio ghosts, Bowie, Zeppelin, Lennon, Alanis Morissette, but he never imitates them. Instead, he channels their spirit of fearless expression. The production balances clarity and grit, letting the orchestration swell without smothering the guitars or the raw vocal edges. Every layer is calibrated to amplify the internal push-pull that the song embodies.
What sets “The Longing” apart from so many contemporary rock releases is its emotional specificity. Kappen isn’t writing generalized angst. He’s mapping the terrain between reason and desire with the precision of someone who’s found himself stranded there more than once. The track doesn’t offer easy answers. It doesn’t even pretend to. What it offers is connection — that recognition you feel in your chest when someone else describes the storm you’ve been weathering.
The lyric video, with its gentle glide through clouded skies, adds a visual metaphor that feels almost too perfect: life above, life below, and a fragile body suspended between the two. That’s exactly where the song exists — in the suspended space between choosing what you know and chasing what you feel.
Harry Kappen has never been afraid to tackle big themes, and his previous singles “Courage,”
“Break These Chains,” “Be Brave If You Can”
have swung between social consciousness and personal revelation. But “The Longing” is something deeper, something more vulnerable. It’s not about the world outside. It’s about the world inside, and the courage it takes to face it without flinching.
In “The Longing,” Kappen delivers some of the most affecting rock music of his career — honest, explosive, beautifully unresolved. It’s a reminder that the battle between head and heart is as old as music itself, and just as essential.
–Doug Marshall
