New Folk Song Imagines Athens Through the Eyes of a Two-Thousand-Year-Old Statue

Luxembourgish singer-songwriter Jeremy Engel will release his new single ‘Athens’ on 14 May, a folk-acoustic ballad written from the perspective of an ancient statue watching the city pass through millennia.

Engel, who is based in Dublin and trained in the Irish singer-songwriter tradition, began the song on the Cycladic island of Amorgos, sitting beside a statue of Erato, the Greek muse of lyric poetry. The melody arrived first. The lyrics would not come.

“I wrote the melody of ‘Athens’ on the Greek island of Amorgos, sitting by the statue of the muse Erato,” Engel says. “The lyrics wouldn’t come until a sculptor told me: ‘This music looks at us – this is the sound of a statue waking while the rest of us are turning into stone.'”

That image, a single statue stirring while flesh-and-blood crowds harden around it, became the song’s central reversal. Recorded in Dublin with producer Larry Hogan and mastered by Sean Mac Erlaine, ‘Athens’ moves at 72 BPM, the kind of patient, unhurried arrangement that lets its conceit breathe: an immortal narrator who has watched lovers, mourners and tourists pass beneath its plinth for two thousand years.

SInger-songwriter Jeremy Engel

In a note to Greek City Times, Engel framed the perspective directly. “I spent a few weeks in the city a while ago and fell completely in love with it. The song came out of that, but it isn’t really about me, or about a tourist’s Athens. It’s written from the perspective of an ancient statue that has stood there for two thousand years, watching generations of people live and die around it. I wanted to capture that strange, quiet tenderness of something that outlasts everyone who passes in front of it.”

I’ve seen the rise / I’ve seen the fall / the holy prayers of the crowds
The lyric tracks that vantage. “I’ve seen the rise / I’ve seen the fall / the holy prayers of the crowds,” the statue intones, before the song closes on a quiet inversion: “I’m just a human made of clay.” It is a final line that leaves the listener unsure whether the marble or the mortal has been speaking all along.

Engel’s path to the song crosses several countries. Raised on the Normandy coast, he learnt his craft in Ireland and refined it on stages in New York, with performances at the Troubadour in London, The Bitter End in New York and the Hard Rock Cafe in Milan. His debut album ‘Roam Like A Wave’, released in November 2024 and also recorded in Dublin, won Best Song at the Oniros Film Awards and was named a finalist for Best Song at the New York International Film Awards. His sound has drawn comparison to Damien Rice, Glen Hansard and Leonard Cohen.