We Speak Music
Rebecca Richards Releases Defiant New Song “Never Too Late”
Four minutes into “Never Too Late,” something clicks. It is not the production, though the production is good. It is not the fact that the musicians behind Rebecca Richards spend their weeks playing with Tim McGraw and Blake Shelton, though that certainly comes through in every note. It is the voice. Rebecca Richards sounds like someone who has actually lived the song she is singing.
That matters more than people give it credit for.
The story of how this record came to exist is almost too good to be true. Saskia Griffiths-Moore, founder of Talent Is Timeless, walked into a gig in Bargoed, South Wales, and offered Rebecca a trip to Nashville on the spot. Her parents were in the room. From a small venue in a Welsh valley to Ocean Way Studios, one of the most storied recording spaces in country music, in what must have felt like the blink of an eye. The whole thing was captured for a TV series. The song was cut in three hours.
You can hear that speed in the recording. There is no overworking, no studio polish that sands down the edges until nothing feels real. Co-produced by Jeff Cohen, whose writing credits span more than 25 million albums sold, and Griffiths-Moore herself, “Never Too Late” sits in exactly the right space between big and intimate. The arrangement breathes. The drums land without trying to prove anything.
Rebecca has spoken about pushing past self-doubt during the Nashville trip, about testing herself in an environment where everyone else in the room had been doing this for decades. None of that reads as a backstory add-on when you listen. It is in the way she delivers the chorus. She is not performing confidence. She has earned it.
Country pop at its best does one thing particularly well: it takes a feeling most people recognise and makes it feel specific enough to belong to one person. This song does that. The theme of chasing something you set aside, of refusing to let the years convince you the window has closed, could easily become a motivational poster set to a Nashville beat. It does not. It sounds personal. It sounds like Rebecca meant it.
“Never Too Late” is the theme tune for the Talent Is Timeless TV series, which gives it a ready-made context and a built-in audience. But the song does not need either of those things to stand up on its own. Strip away the filming, the red carpet premiere at Vue Piccadilly, the production notes, and what you are left with is a well-written country pop record performed by someone who sounds exactly right for it.
You can listen here.
Michele Ducci has unveiled the second single, ‘Woman Like You’, from his forthcoming album and animated film ‘Snail in the Clouds’.
‘Woman Like You’ pairs bright distorted electric guitar with an electronic drumbeat, adding in Ducci’s soulful vocals and a catchy uplifting chorus with Letizia Mandoleisi’s sweet vocal harmonies. A vintage organ pedalboard operated by Ducci simultaneously generates chords, bass and rhythm, like a one-man band. Shane Kennedy (Girl in the Year Above) joins in on guitar. Simon Milner (Is Tropical, Ysing) recorded and produced the track at his 4am Studios in London.
The album and film tell the story of a planet called ‘Snail’, inhabited by hybrids – primarily a mixture between scorpions, snails and humans – who lead a life according to the style of Pythagoras, devoted to music. There is also a cloud man named Agostos, a writer of musical operettas, who together with a talking smoke machine called Doctor Subtilis, begins to kill all hybrids, targeting in particular the hybrid musician Diodoros and his band, in an effort to steal the ark of melodies, an ancient ship that allows the whole planet to survive with music and joy.
The video for the single, created and animated by Ducci and Mandoleisi, delves further into the realm of planet ‘Snail’:
Says Ducci, “The ark of melodies, after various attempts, finally starts to work and fly in the planet Snail, while the shady Doc. Sub. and Agostos, with their platoon of soldiers made of foggy smoke, spy the miracle, planning to steal the ark for their evil and tyrannical purposes.”
About the track, Michele says, “I wrote this song for my love Letizia. Love seen from the mind is the sound we make. Sound is the love of matter.
We used a Technics synthesizer organ from a flea market. I tried to find a mood that was right for the song and I started using the bass of the pedal board together with the synth and the drums, and it was magical to hear the song reveal itself all coming from a single instrument. Leti was singing with me and we recorded everything live in one shot. Then we made Shane do the guitar flight, as if he came out of the window. The idea was to maintain disproportions, guitar thrust and synth drum thinness a la Haroumi Hosono, so as to create an estrangement, but naturally: it’s about how I listen, with close up something that captures me in its nuance as element of a larger orchestra somewhere. I’m glad we decided in the studio with Simon to use the layers of arrangement as the close-ups in the cinema; they look like strange enlargements that perch on parts of a mutated orchestra. I’m happy to come back with this love song at a time when everything seems to opt, even my labor in managing the flows of selfishness that have poured out on me while doing this album, for the sound of war. I’m here happy to be able to say that the sound of love always wins as did for me. Snail in the clouds is one of the most important works in my life and I am glad to start from pure love for this album that is my son.”
The album and full-length film will be released on the 5th of June on Monotreme Records.
Michele and Letizia’s previous musical short film, ‘The Great Book of Nature’, is an official selection for the 2026 Venice Shorts Film Festival.
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