To find Liam Naughton & The Educators returning with their new single, “Daughter,” is to discover an instrument case left shut for five years has been opened, not out of dusty nostalgia, but to build something new. An acoustic guitar provides the skeleton, a sturdy and familiar frame, but it’s the flesh and spirit layered upon it—celeste, piano, harp—that gives the song its peculiar, shimmering life. For a moment, with that chiming celeste, I was sure I was listening to a lost outtake from Tchaikovsky’s toy chest, a melody for a sugar plum fairy who has just learned to slam doors.
That duality is precisely the point. The track orbits a love of parental, cosmic scale—a devotion so complete it collapses space and re-centers the universe around a single, small person. And yet, this isn’t a flawless celestial dance. The lyrics don’t flinch from the friction of it all, the shared frustrations and daily papercuts that are as much a part of the bond as the stargazing wonder. Liam Naughton and guitarist Cameron Hayes have built a cathedral of sound dedicated to a love that is simultaneously holy and profoundly, exhaustingly messy.
There’s this sense of a baton being passed, a generational weight settled onto the shoulders. It’s a love that becomes a duty, a purpose statement written not in ink but in sleepless nights and relinquished dreams. The song itself feels less like a performance and more like a private vow made public, a document of willing depletion for another’s happiness.
It leaves you wondering not what the father sees when he looks at his daughter, but what kind of sprawling, chaotic, beautiful universe she must see reflected back in her father’s exhausted, star-filled eyes.
