Listening to Lucas Pasley’s new single, “Laissez-Faire Love,” is less like pressing play and more like easing into a worn-in armchair that has held the shape of a thousand thoughtful conversations. The title itself sounds like an economic policy for the heart, and frankly, it’s a brilliant one: a declaration of free-market emotional enterprise where partners are sovereign states, not colonies.
Pasley doesn’t sing about a clingy, all-consuming passion. Instead, with a voice that carries the unvarnished grain of Appalachian hardwood, he champions a tougher, braver affection. This is a love that says, “Go, be wildly, inexplicably you. I’ll be over here, being just as peculiar, and we’ll meet in the middle when it feels right.” The arrangement is just as beautifully uncluttered—a confident banjo picking its path, a country fiddle that sighs with understanding, and a guitar that provides the ground beneath your feet. There’s no jostling for attention.
This musical spaciousness is the whole point. For a moment, listening, I forgot it was a song and instead smelled my grandfather’s workshop—that mix of sawdust and turpentine, the scent of patience, the quiet assurance that sturdy things require room to be built right. Pasley has crafted an anthem for relationships that breathe. He’s not just singing about freedom in love, but love as freedom, where the deepest intimacy is the unspoken trust that you can leave and will always be welcomed back, unchanged or entirely new.
It’s a deceptively gentle track that plants a rather thorny question in your mind. We all want to be loved with such glorious, untethered acceptance, but do we possess the courage to actually give it?
