There are songs that begin as something else entirely and carry the memory of their origin in every note, the original form still audible beneath the transformed one, the poem in the production and the divorce in the melody. Allan Jamisen, the Phoenix-based composer and painter whose work has consistently occupied the space where introspection and cinematic atmosphere intersect, released Closing In on May 16, 2026, and the track’s origin story is one of the more genuinely interesting in his catalog, reaching back to Denmark in the 1990s where the material that eventually became this song began as a poem written in the aftermath of a divorce and a period of profound personal examination.
That three-decade gap between the poem’s composition and the song’s release is not simply a biographical curiosity but a fundamental dimension of what Closing In is and what it does emotionally. A poem written in the immediate aftermath of emotional devastation carries a different quality than one written from the distance of resolved hindsight, and the specific character of that 1990s Danish writing, the self-examination of someone immersed in recovery and genuinely trying to understand the destructive patterns that had shaped a relationship’s collapse, is preserved in the song rather than smoothed over by the intervening years. Jamisen did not revisit the poem and rewrite it from the perspective of someone who had figured everything out. He handed it to his collaborator and allowed the original emotional weight of the words to guide the sonic direction from the outset, which is why the finished track carries the specific quality of being both then and now simultaneously.
The collaboration that brought the poem into musical form began at a hotel bar in Phoenix, the kind of meeting that does not seem to have particular significance until it becomes the origin story of something remarkable. French musician and recording engineer Olivier Zahm had a European sensibility that resonated with Jamisen’s years spent in Denmark, the geography of the original writing suddenly present again in the person sitting across from him. Zahm’s role was to interpret the poem musically without the mediation of Jamisen’s usual compositional process, which reverses the conventional songwriter’s approach of music first and words after. The experiment, giving existing emotionally loaded text to a collaborator and asking them to hear the music in it, produced results that Jamisen identifies as one of the most rewarding collaborative experiences of his career.
The sonic character that Zahm brought to the poem and that the subsequent Los Angeles sessions with veteran producer John X Volaitis expanded and deepened creates a production that resists categorization in the most genuine sense, atmospheric yet immediate, melancholic yet strangely uplifting, the contradictory qualities coexisting not as a stylistic compromise but as an accurate sonic representation of what recovery from emotional devastation actually feels like, the grief and the emerging clarity present simultaneously rather than sequentially. Volaitis’s credits, work with The Rolling Stones, Tracy Chapman, Bonnie Raitt, and Michael Hutchence of INXS, represent a career defined by music with genuine emotional weight, and his contribution to Closing In through engineering and co-production and the incorporation of female backing vocals reflects this sensibility, the interplay of voices elevating the emotional dimension of the material in exactly the way he and Jamisen had been discovering across their recent collaborative sessions.
The jangling guitar flourishes that appear beneath Jamisen’s solemn vocal delivery carry a specifically effective tonal combination, the jangle being simultaneously bright and melancholy in a way that very few other guitar sounds achieve, present and slightly distant, immediate and already fading. The recurring closing in again refrain drifting through the track has the quality of a phrase that means multiple things depending on the direction of the claustrophobia it describes, closing in being both the pressure of difficult emotions tightening around the self and the gradual approach of clarity as self-examination does its work, the walls coming in and the understanding coming in both describing the same movement from different emotional perspectives.
The line about second-guessing instinct being the wrong way down a one-way street is the kind of specific psychological observation that good confessional songwriting produces when the writing has genuinely worked through the experience rather than simply described it, the image catching a specific destructive pattern in an image precise enough to make anyone who recognizes it in their own behavior feel simultaneously exposed and relieved to have it named. The other line cited, sometimes it’s not right enough to live in my own skin, is the more vulnerable statement and the more universal one, the quality of alienation from oneself that certain periods of crisis produce being something that the song holds without dramatizing or resolving, the discomfort allowed to exist in the music rather than being managed away by the production.
Jamisen’s parallel work as a painter informs his compositional approach in ways that the visual vocabulary of Closing In makes audible, the spacey synth pads and intertwining vocal layers creating depth and texture in the way that a painter creates depth and texture, the layers added not for decorative purposes but to build a world with genuine dimensionality. The haunting backing vocals provide what the track’s description calls a reflective glow, the feminine voices adding not just harmonic richness but the quality of being witnessed in the emotional experience being described, the song moving from the isolation of the Danish 1990s into something more collectively held.
The poem began in winter in Denmark. The song arrives in Phoenix three decades later. The closing in was the original emotion and the closing in is the comfort now. Jamisen has made something that holds both without choosing between them, which is what the best songs about transformation manage when they trust the difficulty rather than rushing toward the resolution.
