Tom Odell released his hit song “Another Love” on his debut EP, “Songs from Another Love,” back in 2012. Over a decade later, its popularity has only grown. The pianist and singer-songwriter proved that with an electric performance at Glastonbury 2025, where he had a capacity crowd singing along.
The song captures a complex human emotion.
“‘Another Love’ is a confusing one; it’s not a traditional love song,” Odell said in an interview. “The song, for me, is about trying—really trying with all your heart—to be with someone else and you want to be with someone else. The song was written talking to this girl that I really wanted to be with, and I was trying to work out why I couldn’t be with her.”
That’s not the only thing that’s untraditional about “Another Love.” Although the song is written in the key of G, Odell’s subdued and vulnerable verses never resolve to the tonic. Instead, they emphasize the IV chord (C), the vi (Emin), and the iii (Bmin). By avoiding a resolution to G, Odell builds a sense of tension and confusion, perfectly matching his lyrical intent.
The anthemic chorus finally finds its way to the tonic, but not before it starts on a Cmaj7 chord. It also eschews the typical I-V-vi-IV chord progression. The chorus’s four-chord cycle is IV-I-vi-iii, or Cmaj7-G-Emin-Bmin. Even when we find the home chord, it is followed by two minor chords, bringing us back into a swirl of emotions.
The song’s original recording also has some distinct aspects, namely in its pronounced use of Odell’s breathing. While many engineers edit breathing between lyrics to reduce noise, “Another Love” uses it musically.
“Few singles have used the power of breath noise as powerfully as this recent one from Tom Odell, and it therefore repays careful listening ‘between the notes’, so to speak,” says The Mix Review. “The most impressive bit for me is the first verse, where the immaculate rhythmic timing of the breaths gives a fantastic sense of suppressed urgency to his delivery, despite the tremulous vulnerability of the sung timbre — combining those two attributes in the same performance is deceptively tricky to do, and it’s the kind of thing few singers can really pull off.”
Follow along with the sheet music for Tom Odell’s “Another Love”:
