“A Slow Burn Romance” by Ella Scarlet — A Luminous Nocturne for Lovers and Late Nights
A First Embrace: The Spell of Romantic Jazz Reimagined
Some songs don’t announce themselves; they arrive like a warm room at twilight, a door closing softly behind you, the first faint clink of glassware from a distant bar. “A Slow Burn Romance” by Ella Scarlet belongs to that rare breed of romantic jazz that doesn’t chase attention so much as concentrate it—softly, deliberately—until the ordinary air of the evening turns to candlelight. From its opening seconds, the track murmurs a promise: to be intimate yet expansive, understated yet unforgettable, a modern torch song that evokes the smoky club vibe of a bygone era without ever feeling like pastiche.
It’s easy listening in the most flattering sense of the phrase—easy because it’s elegant, not because it asks little of you. Scarlet’s velvet voice floats inside an intimate recording that feels close-mic and carefully staged, with a hi-fi jazz sheen that reveals the gentle swing of brushed drums and the earthy halo of an upright bass. The first impression is of calm: slow tempo jazz breathing in long, confident lines; soft piano jazz sketching moonlit harmonies; a tasteful saxophone that rises like a tender confession; and, later, a muted trumpet gliding in with the smoky hush of a quiet promise. This is romantic slow jazz designed for the long evening—late night jazz that lingers in the room like perfume and keeps you swaying in place long after the final chord dims.
The Voice in the Half-Light: Ella Scarlet’s Whispered Presence
Ella Scarlet’s greatest gift is restraint. She doesn’t sing at you; she sings to you, or, more precisely, to that secret place where your best memories and your quietest longings meet. The vocal approach is a masterclass in contemporary vocal jazz control: breathy vocals with just enough air to suggest closeness; whisper vocals that never collapse into affectation; a calm, centered vibrato that blooms precisely at the end of phrases; and a behind-the-beat phrasing that tugs the groove backward by a breath or two, making every bar feel like an unhurried exhale.
In “A Slow Burn Romance,” Scarlet leans into close-mic vocals that sound as if they were captured in a small-room jazz session with a boutique production ethos—spacious stereo image, a warm reverb tail, and tasteful compression that keeps her tone soft-focus without dulling its presence. The result is a velvet-hour music glow: you can hear the shape of her mouth on consonants, the softened sibilants, the intimacy of the breath before a line, all of it woven into a mix that feels like the hushed end of a conversation, the moment when a glance says more than a paragraph. Scarlet’s timbre moves between warm mezzo and soft soprano, a female crooner vibe that suggests the lineage of jazz chanteuses and modern indie jazz singers while sounding entirely like herself.
This is where the magic happens: in the way her voice turns a lyric into a moonlit confession, in the way her dynamic hush feels both tasteful and deeply personal. She understands that sensual jazz is about temperature regulation—keeping the flame steady, letting the glow reach every corner—and she makes that artful balance feel effortless.
The Ensemble’s Pulse: Brushed Drums, Upright Bass, and Late-Evening Piano
Romantic jazz lives and dies by its rhythm section, and “A Slow Burn Romance” thrives. The brushed drums whisper rather than strike, all brushed snare and soft ride cymbal with gentle rim clicks that tilt the groove into a soft swing. There’s the faint, tactile rasp of wire on head, the quiet metronome of the ride bell half-swallowed by room tone—exactly the right texture for candlelight jazz and after hours jazz. This is sway music, not stomp music. It’s the slow dance in the kitchen, cheek to cheek under nothing but the fridge light and the promise of midnight jazz.
Underneath, the upright bass—an earthy double bass ballad voice—anchors the track with a plush, woody resonance. The lines are simple, deliberate, and affectionate, pulling the harmony along like a hand at the small of the back. You can feel the strings’ grain, the soft thump of fingertips, the micro-bloom of the instrument in a warm room tone. It’s the physicality of acoustic jazz ballad craft rendered with audiophile care, and it deepens the romantic ambience by keeping everything grounded, human, and unforced.
Across the top, the piano, voiced like late-evening piano in a hotel lobby jazz setting, plays with soft harmonies and lush chords that leave air for the vocal. The pianist favors tasteful dynamics—a light left hand, a right hand that lingers over tender chord extensions, a subtle run that evaporates as soon as you try to catch it. The cumulative effect is tranquil jazz that never surrenders to blandness: elegant jazz with enough harmonic color to feel sophisticated, enough space to feel intimate.
Horns as Heartbeats: Lyrical Saxophone and Sultry, Muted Trumpet
What elevates “A Slow Burn Romance” beyond the typical lounge jazz mood piece is its patience with melody. The lyrical saxophone doesn’t hurry into the scene; it waits for the room to breathe, then enters like someone closing the door to keep the warmth in. The lines are smooth legato with delicate phrasing, gathered into short, melodic paragraphs that echo the song’s vocal hook rather than competing with it. There’s blues-kissed ballad warmth here, a hint of noir jazz in how the sax resolves downward, as if unwilling to let the moment disappear.
Then, near the bridge, the trumpet arrives—muted trumpet, silvery and intimate as a stage whisper. It doesn’t soar; it confides. The phrasing is narrative jazz, sentences with commas and full stops, and the timbre is saturated with natural reverb that spills into the corners of the stereo field. In the space between sax and trumpet, the track seems to turn the dimmer switch down one more notch, embracing the soft groove of a modern classic jazz ballad that knows precisely when to be quiet. These horn statements function like handwritten notes left by lovers—short, distinct, a little perfumed, utterly keepsake-worthy.
The Production’s Soft Glow: Analog Warmth in a Boutique Mix
From an audiophile perspective, “A Slow Burn Romance” is a small miracle of restraint. The production favors analog warmth and organic instrumentation, letting every transient glide rather than snap. The mix has dynamic headroom; it breathes. There’s a natural reverb halo around the vocal that feels like the work of a room rather than a plug-in, and the piano occupies a lane with refined mixing that never intrudes on the singer’s midrange. The upright bass sits slightly left of center, the brushed snare slightly right, building a spacious mix that invites headphone-friendly jazz listening as much as soft speaker jazz over a dinner party.
Tasteful compression is the secret spine of the recording. It gathers the performance without flattening it, preserving the micro-dynamics that make brushed drums feel alive and late-evening piano feel three-dimensional. The result is premium vocal jazz in the literal sense: an indulgence in sound quality that never calls attention to itself. You perceive the engineering only because the emotion stands so clearly in front of you. This is boutique production with a refined easy listening heartbeat, the quiet assurance of a team that knows the music’s job is to hold the moment, not to rush it.
The Lyric as Story: A Candlelit Confession
“A Slow Burn Romance” presents itself as a love song jazz narrative—poetic jazz lyric lines arranged like the slow turning of a page. Even without a printed text in front of you, Scarlet’s diction suggests a storyteller vocals sensibility: imagery of city lights jazz reflections in rainy window glass, the hush of moonlight jazz along the skyline, a late-night listening ritual that turns a quiet apartment into an intimate club session. The lyric’s perspective is first person but open-armed, a tender love song that lets the listener step into the scene and wear it like a favorite sweater.
What’s striking is how the song understands intimacy—not as drama, but as accumulation. The chorus returns not with fireworks, but with a deeper shimmer of the same emotion, a subtle jazz doubling of harmony that feels like being pulled a half-inch closer. Lines fold back on themselves with soft harmonies, behind-the-beat phrasing that lets words settle before moving on, and a whispered refrain that reads like a tender promise. It’s a torch song sensibility reshaped for contemporary croon textures: not torch as in blaze but as in lantern glow, a sure, steady light carried along a moonbeam jazz path.
The Tempo of Tenderness: Why Slow Matters
Romantic easy listening often gets dismissed as background music, but slow tempo jazz tells a different story: it asks for presence. “A Slow Burn Romance” chooses a low-tempo ballad pulse—call it in the 60–70 bpm jazz pocket—where each beat is an invitation to lean closer. At this pace, the band’s micro-gestures take on enormous emotional weight. The bass’s slight drag turns into gravitas. The brushed snare’s ghost notes become a heartbeat. The soft ride cymbal’s arc becomes the shiver of starlight jazz.
Slow isn’t static here; it’s sensual. The harmonic rhythm moves with the curiosity of two people learning each other’s timing, delaying a cadence by a breath, arriving at a resolution one step late on purpose. Scarlet shapes that delay with expressive vibrato that widens at phrase endings, turning cadences into caresses. This is sway slow jazz in the purest sense: the body insists on moving even when the song barely does. The slow burn is the point—the slow burn is the romance.
The Mood-Setting Mastery: From Date Night to Quiet Storm
To call “A Slow Burn Romance” playlist-friendly would be to undersell its flexibility. It’s the rare romantic lounge track that can score a candlelit dinner music setting without slipping into anonymity, a boutique hotel playlist selection that still sounds personal when played softly over conversation. It functions beautifully as jazz for two, jazz for couples, a date night jazz anchor that leaves rooms warmer than it found them. Yet listen closer—really listen—and you’ll find quiet storm jazz vocal intensity channeled through a calmer weather pattern. The song doesn’t tame desire; it refines it.
Imagine the use cases, and the track stands ready. It’s wedding dinner jazz that can drift beneath silverware without losing its glow, first dance jazz for couples who prefer whispered gestures over spectacle, cocktail hour jazz that slows the after-work clatter into an elegant hum. It feels right in a wine bar jazz setting with brick walls and a half-lit marquee, in a piano bar jazz corner near the window as rain sutures the city into a soft-focus postcard, in a speakeasy jazz room where the air tastes faintly of citrus and nostalgia. The more specific your scene, the more precisely this song seems to fit it.
City at Night: A Cinematic Setting for the Contemporary Heart
What I love most about this recording is its cinematic jazz sensibility. You can place it on a romantic soundtrack without altering a note—noir jazz at the edges, dusky jazz across the center, twilit chords glowing like the skyline after a storm. It’s evening lounge music that behaves like a cinematic cue, calibrated for the moment when two characters stop talking and understand each other perfectly.
The arrangement builds images: the soft ride cymbal as streetlight flicker, the upright bass as a city’s subterranean purr, the piano’s lush chords as light in a penthouse window, the lyrical saxophone tracing the path of a late train carving through the riverfront jazz curve of a bridge. The muted trumpet, when it enters, becomes the camera’s slow push toward a doorway as someone reaches for a hand. Minimalist jazz elements carry a maximal emotional payload. The song is a movie without dialogue, and your memory is the screen.
Small Combo, Big Intimacy: The Power of a Quiet Ensemble
One of the track’s subtle triumphs is how much it achieves with small forces. This is a small combo jazz setting—piano-bass-drums trio with cameo shadows of saxophone spotlight and muted trumpet feature—and yet it fills the room like a secret. Minimalism helps. There’s no need for a string section to tell you what to feel; the double bass ballad hum and brushed snare knowledgeably handle it. There’s no need for guitar flourishes, though a nylon-string jazz whisper appears like a ghost in one of the later verses, all soft arpeggios and warm reverb that fade before you can quite confirm them. The arrangement knows not to crowd the singer.
Economy becomes intimacy. Understated arrangement decisions—who enters when, who leaves space for whom—reinforce the lover’s logic of attention. You feel cared for as a listener because the music never interrupts itself. Everything you need is present; nothing you don’t need intrudes.
The Luxury of Restraint: Sophistication Without Excess
In an era when so much music is shaped to be noticed in the noisiest possible rooms, “A Slow Burn Romance” dares to assume you’re in a small one. It imagines the boutique hotel playlist, the supper club jazz corridor, the gallery opening music montage, the fine dining soundtrack whisper, and chooses elegance over spectacle every time. This gives the track a refined jazz intelligence—sophisticated jazz that is both adult contemporary jazz and something subtler, truer. It’s soft jazz without being saccharine, easy listening without being anonymous, lounge jazz without the plastic sheen.
Ella Scarlet’s artistry is a lesson in modern standards style. She writes and performs in a way that feels timeless, as if there’s a thread from Parisian jazz night to New York midnight jazz, from London lounge jazz to Scandinavian nighttime jazz, braided through her phrasing. She’s an independent jazz artist whose sensibility is cosmopolitan, not generic—coastal evening jazz against skyline jazz, bedroom window jazz shading into bookshop jazz. The more contexts you place her in, the more vividly she defines herself.
Intimacy as Craft: The Microphysics of Feeling
Look closely into the song’s microscopic details and you see a luthier’s level of care applied to human emotion. The way the bass releases a note just as the vocal finishes a soft consonant, creating a tiny vacuum the piano fills with a single, understated upper extension. The way a brushed snare accent moves an eighth-note earlier on the second chorus, lending a slight tug to the groove that your chest interprets as anticipation. The way Scarlet’s expressive vibrato narrows on a word like “near,” then widens on a word like “stay,” as if she’s arching the space between those ideas with breath alone.
Even the reverb choices—natural reverb on the vocal that lingers a hair longer than the horn’s shorter, more intimate tail—suggest a narrative. It’s as if the room itself is listening hard, answering the singer with a hush. This is ambient vocal jazz not because it blurs edges, but because it treats the edges with respect.
The Emotional Arc: From Quiet Confession to Gentle Nocturne
If the track has a plot, it begins in quiet confession and ends in gentle nocturne. The first verse is intimacy newly acknowledged; the chorus accepts it; the middle section—those moonbeam jazz horns—deepens the promise; the final chorus is home. There are no fireworks, and that is the point. The arc resolves inward rather than upward, like the feeling at the end of a good dinner when no one wants dessert because the conversation is already sweet.
Scarlet’s storytelling honors the psychology of a slow burn romance—the truth that desire, when respected, strengthens with subtlety. She doesn’t confuse subtle with small, though. There’s an emotional resonance in the way she leans over vowels, in the way she lets silence answer the lyric for a beat, in the way the band breathes with her. This is serenade at midnight, not serenade at a balcony: near, hushed ballad, as if intended for one set of ears.
A Place for Every Evening: How the Song Meets Your Life
Consider how easily “A Slow Burn Romance” fits into the rituals of a well-kept life. It’s perfect for a romantic dinner jazz setting—linen napkins, candlelit playlist, quiet laughter. It’s made for weeknight wind-down when the city outside flickers through blinds and tea-time jazz slips into evening chill jazz. It’s a relaxing soundtrack for reading jazz and writing jazz, for study jazz and focus jazz, a calm love ambiance that steadies the room without sapping it of warmth. It’s cuddle music for the couch, fireplace jazz for winter, cozy autumn jazz for the season of sweaters, spring rain jazz when drops braid themselves across the glass, summer night jazz when the skyline hums with possibility.
For the milestone moments, it fits too: anniversary dinner music that revisits the soft swing of first love with a refined palette; proposal soundtrack that understands gravity without melodrama; honeymoon evening music that keeps the room slow and tender; romantic getaway playlist that stitches a new city’s noises into your private rhythm. Play it at a wedding dinner, and it will make the silverware sound like a hush. Play it in a boutique retail playlist, and you’ll see more people holding hands. Play it in a spa jazz setting and the breath in the room will even out.
The Audiophile’s Corner: Why It Sounds So Good Everywhere
Great romantic jazz travels well—from big speakers to tiny earbuds, from car stereo to living room hi-fi—because it preserves phase coherence, frequency balance, and dynamic nuance. “A Slow Burn Romance” does all three. The low end is present but not puffy; the bass fundamental is clear around the 60–80 Hz pocket, the body stays intact up through the 200–300 Hz warmth zone, and there’s no smeared mud around the piano’s left hand. The midrange—home of the human voice and much of love itself—is protected: Scarlet sits where she should, well-lit but never piercing, a premium vocal jazz archetype that rewards both headphone intimacy and soft speaker background.
Highs are graceful rather than hyped; the brushed cymbals carry air without white noise, the reverb tail glows rather than hisses. Stereo imaging is crisp enough that you can map the trio’s positions in a small-room jazz stage, yet the center never collapses when you fold down to mono in a hotel lobby jazz deployment. This attention to technical polish is what allows the song to do its emotional job in so many contexts. You don’t notice the engineering because you feel the evening.
Tradition and Today: A Modern Classic Without Quotation Marks
There’s a delicate line between honoring standards-inspired ballad tradition and sounding trapped by it. Ella Scarlet walks that line with the poise of someone who knows the canon and trusts her own voice. The chord vocabulary will satisfy lovers of evergreen romantic jazz—extensions that bloom like evening flowers, cadences with a bluesy romance sigh—but the lyrical point of view is modern, crisp, and emotionally literate. In this sense, the track is a contemporary croon that doesn’t need to shout its contemporary-ness. It just lives it.
The references are there if you want them—the soft swing of cool jazz vibes, the lounge jazz sophistication of mid-century supper clubs, the intimate club session aura of legendary small rooms—yet the song belongs to now. It’s indie love ballad poise meeting adult contemporary jazz ease, a modern torch song for quiet storm sensibilities, a soundtrack for love that assumes adulthood is not the enemy of wonder.
Ella Scarlet’s Artistic Signature: Moonlight as Method
If you’ve spent time with Ella Scarlet’s catalog, you’ll recognize a recurring devotion to moonlight—the way she treats nighttime not as the absence of daylight but as the presence of electricity, privacy, and possibility. “A Slow Burn Romance” continues that signature. It is moonlit jazz not because it mentions the moon, but because its entire architecture is designed to glow in low light. The recording encourages soft-focus listening, the arrangement rewards attentive ears, the vocal approach assumes that the most honest truths are spoken gently.
There’s a kinship here with the dreamy jazz language of starlight jazz, the noir jazz hush of city at night soundtrack writing, the dusky lounge vibe of boutique hotel playlists, and, yes, the moonlit serenade vibe that fans associate with Scarlet’s romantic jazz persona. If you’ve ever found yourself standing at a bedroom window jazz moment, looking down at a street softened by rain, you’ll find yourself inside this song before the first chorus.
Emotional Usefulness: Music That Does Something for You
A positive review should say more than “this is beautiful.” It should explain what the music does for your life. “A Slow Burn Romance” does several things exceedingly well. It lowers heart rate without dulling alertness—relaxation jazz that calms while sharpening the senses. It creates psychological proximity—intimate recording choices that make conversation easier, hands find hands faster, and the evening collapses into the distance between two people. It improves settings—restaurants sound more elegant, apartments feel more like sanctuaries, even a night drive turns into a velvet corridor with late-night listening hush.
It also respects solitude. Play it alone with a glass of something amber and the room will change shape; lamp light will tilt toward gold, the past will feel near but not heavy, and a gentle nocturne mood will fold over your shoulders. If music is a tool for mood management, “A Slow Burn Romance” is Swiss-made: precise, quiet, unerringly reliable.
The Language of Touch: Phrasing as Affection
Phrasing in jazz is touch made audible. Scarlet understands this deeply. Her behind-the-beat phrasing feels like a hand lingering on a doorway before entering. Her legato lines are smooth enough to suggest a long embrace; her short, breathy pickups feel like the quick brush of a shoulder. In the chorus, when she stretches a vowel across two bars and lets a tiny wave of expressive vibrato bloom at the end, you can practically feel the breath on your cheek. This is sensual music that never confuses explicit with intimate; it is soft light jazz that trusts implication.
The horns mirror this language. The saxophone uses turns and mordents like fingertips changing direction, the muted trumpet allows little smears and half-valves that imitate the warmth of skin. The band as a whole understands what it means to be gentle without being vague, tender without being fragile. Their touch is certain.
Space as a Musical Partner: The Beauty of What Isn’t Played
Great ballads are edited by silence as much as they are written by notes. “A Slow Burn Romance” is a lesson in what not to play. The drummer doesn’t fill every gap; he lets the brushed snare whisper, then vanish. The pianist refuses flashy runs; he presents harmonic gifts and steps back. The horns appear, speak, and leave space behind like a turned-down bed. Scarlet sings, and then she doesn’t, and the after-image of her phrase does half the emotional labor.
This kind of space is not emptiness; it’s invitation. It lets you walk into the song rather than standing outside it. You become a participant in the romance the music proposes. It’s why the track works as romantic background music and as a centerpiece for mindful listening: the space accommodates you at whatever distance you choose.
Seasons and Settings: How the Song Colors Time
Some songs belong to a season. “A Slow Burn Romance” belongs to all four, tinting each differently. In autumn, it is cozy evening music—cozy couch listening while leaves tap at the window. In winter, it is fireplace jazz, a wool blanket of sound. In spring, it’s spring rain jazz, the tiny percussions of water on metal under the brushed snare hiss. In summer, it’s summer night jazz for stargazing music, a slow romance playlist for rooftop dinners and balcony whispers.
It suits Sunday night jazz rituals when the city gets quiet and the week is poised like a held breath. It soothes evening commute calm when taillights smear into a river of red. It dignifies a dinner party jazz moment, smoothes an elegant soirée playlist, warms a boutique retail playlist, and deepens a hotel cocktail hour. It can be private bedroom jazz for soft kisses, living room sway music for slow dance jazz, or bookshop jazz that turns browsing into a love story. The song’s adaptability is a function of its honesty; it doesn’t impose a vibe so much as it amplifies the one you’ve chosen.
Why It Feels Timeless: The Evergreen Logic of Love at a Slow Tempo
Timelessness in music is often a matter of balance—between specificity and universality, craft and spontaneity, surface and depth. “A Slow Burn Romance” finds that balance. It is specific in tone—the brushed drums really are brushed drums, the upright bass really does bloom in wood—and universal in subject. It is crafted to a fault—no click-track sterility, no synthetic fixations—and yet spontaneous in its phrasing and interplay. Its surface is luxurious, all warm jazz tones and velvet voice, while its depth is the human pace of a heart choosing not to hurry.
This evergreen romantic jazz glow makes it a natural fit for couple’s playlists, anniversary playlists, Valentine’s jazz, proposal dinner jazz, honeymoon evening music—any occasion where love is present, private, and unperformative. There’s no trendiness to expire here, only quality. Years from now, this will still sound like the right speed for affection.
The Artist Behind the Atmosphere: Ella Scarlet’s Quiet Authority
It matters who sings a song like this. Ella Scarlet brings quiet authority to music that could have vanished into generic elegance in lesser hands. She has the courage to do less, the technique to make less feel like more, and the storyteller’s instinct to let the listener complete the picture. Her persona is that of a sultry chanteuse with modern clarity—romantic indie jazz singer meets jazz chanteuse in a room where analog warmth surrounds a contemporary heart.
Scarlet also exhibits a subtle producer’s ear. Even if she didn’t man the console, the performance choices suggest a leader who knows where to place a breath, where to hold a note for the sake of the mix, where to invite a saxophone and where to let silence glow. There’s a refined, boutique production intelligence in how her vocal sits—front and center but never overbearing, soft but not dull, breathy but not noisy. It’s the sound of an artist who trusts the microphone and the room.
Memory and Repetition: The Song as a Place You Return To
The best romantic lounge pieces are habit-forming because they create not only a sound but a location. “A Slow Burn Romance” becomes a room you can reenter at will. The opening piano figure is the door. The brushed snare is the lamp on the table. The bass is the chair that fits your body exactly. Scarlet’s first line is the scent you know from the last time you were here. This is music as interior design for the heart, continually restoring itself to a soft, dim equilibrium that brightens everything in it.
After three or four listens, you’ll start to anticipate tiny details—how the sax rests its final note just under the vocal pickup, how the trumpet turns phrase endings into ellipses, how the piano tips a voicing toward bossa-tinged ballad softness without fully leaving American soil. You return for these details, but also for the quiet consent they imply: this is a place where love slows down, where time is a partner, where you can let a moment be exactly as long as it needs to be.
A Gentle Verdict: Music for Holding Hands in the Dark
It’s fashionable to conclude with oversized superlatives, but “A Slow Burn Romance” does not want your trumpet fanfare. It wants your attention, your evening, your hand in another’s hand. This is soothing jazz that respects your intelligence, calming jazz that honors your senses, a sophisticated serenade that assumes you prefer quiet elegance to loud declarations. As vocal jazz for modern adults, it’s nearly ideal: audiophile vocal jazz glow, intimate mic technique, tasteful dynamics, understated arrangement, and a singer who understands that the softest line can carry the deepest truth.
Ella Scarlet has delivered a timeless jazz ballad that feels both classic and new, a modern torch song that will sit comfortably alongside the great standards while staking out its own lunar territory. It’s lounge jazz that can be the soundtrack for a candlelit dinner, a companion for writing and reading, a balm for stress relief jazz rituals, a partner for mindfulness, a whisper at cocktail hour, a blessing at a wedding dinner, a confidante for bedroom jazz after the world goes quiet.
If you believe that love is, in fact, a slow burn—that it deepens when you give it time, breath, and warmth—then this song is a soft, steady flame you can carry with you everywhere. Put it on in the background, and it will make the room beautiful. Put it on in the foreground, and it will make the night unforgettable. In either case, “A Slow Burn Romance” by Ella Scarlet earns its title one hushed bar at a time, leaving behind that rarest of musical aftertastes: not just satisfaction, but an invitation to lean even closer.
