Tom Hancock - I Could Have Run

​Tom Hancock

I Could Have Run
self-released; 2025

By Matt Jensen
​

“I Could Have Run” is a song about death, but not in the abstract. It feels close, personal, and sharply defined. Tom Hancock writes from the imagined perspective of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny in the final moments before his murder. The track rests on a single decision. The return to a homeland that had already decided his fate. What struck me most wasn’t the political backdrop, though it is undeniably present, but the quiet sorrow of knowing you are leaving your family behind.

Hancock wrote the song in Paris on February 16, 2024, the day Navalny’s death was confirmed. That proximity gives the piece a kind of rawness that feels unfiltered. It doesn't seem carefully sculpted in a studio setting. It feels like it was captured while the emotion was still taking shape. A year later, he recorded the final version at home, but that urgency is still there. The recording carries the sense that the song arrived almost fully formed, as if it came through him more than from him.

The arrangement is sparse. Gentle fingerpicked guitar and banjo give the track a delicate texture that reminded me of Sufjan Stevens, especially in the way the softness is used to convey something deeply painful. The song has dynamics but never forces them. Its restraint is part of what makes it effective.

What I admired most is how Hancock lets the song breathe. He doesn’t overstate the loss. He simply allows the grief to speak through tone, through pacing, through what isn’t said. “I Could Have Run” doesn’t attempt to sum up Navalny’s story. It sits with one impossible moment and allows it to unfold on its own terms.

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