Who Am I

There's something about Who Am I that makes it sound more intimate than the rest of Dream Your Life Away. It's not just the restrained tempo or the acoustic guitar dragging between verses, but that feeling that every note is there to remind the listener of something. It's not a song that pushes itself forward, but one that lingers like a whisper. The Vance Joy of 2014 already had that deep, melodic voice that seems made to fill small rooms, but here he uses it differently: not to sing about grand deeds, but to quietly ask who he really is.

They recorded it in Washington with Ryan Hadlock, that producer who usually works in small spaces and with unassuming equipment. The result is an album where the sound feels organic, as if every take had been the first. Who Am I doesn’t break records in length—it’s just two minutes and thirty-nine seconds long—but in those seconds, an entire conversation fits. The album came out in September 2014 in Australia and New Zealand, and though it later expanded to other markets, this song never needed more than its own voice to stay in people’s heads. By the time the deluxe edition launched in 2015, it had already sold over two million copies worldwide, yet the track remained the same: unpretentious, unadorned, just a question that echoes after the music fades.