“SET ME FREE” by Jack Horton

Jack Horton begins his EP Imperfections not with a flourish, but with a quiet unraveling. Set Me Free is a gentle reckoning—a track that moves like breath through still air, weighted with the ache of letting go and the grace of acceptance. There’s no need for dramatic gestures here; the power lies in restraint, in the soft piano notes that fall like confession, in melodies that carry more truth than spectacle. The song does not rush. It allows space—between phrases, between chords—for feeling to gather. Horton’s voice is calm, but never detached. There’s something raw beneath the surface, something recently unburied. He sings not to relive the pain, but to make peace with it. That quiet resolve gives the track its gravity. Every note feels earned.

Horton brings to the song a perspective that stretches beyond the usual arc of a music career. Years spent in law, politics, and business have carved into his writing a kind of emotional clarity that doesn’t rely on cleverness. There’s no need to impress—only to tell the truth, and tell it well. That grounded quality makes Set Me Free feel less like a performance and more like a moment of personal truth captured in sound. Stylistically, the track is rooted in folk and Americana but doesn’t bind itself too tightly to any genre. It belongs more to the tradition of storytelling than to any one musical label. Horton’s global sensibility—shaped by time performing in both the U.S. and Japan—lends the song a quiet openness, as if it could belong anywhere, to anyone who’s ever known the cost of love.

Set Me Free is not a grand gesture. It is the act of opening a hand. It’s the breath taken after the storm has passed, the quiet acknowledgment that freedom and heartbreak sometimes walk side by side. As the opening track of Imperfections, it offers a mission statement in soft focus: that beauty lives in the unresolved, and that sometimes the most honest songs are the ones sung just above a whisper.