Ferdinand Rennie – “Why Do We Try?”

Ferdinand Rennie has been around long enough to have earned his stripes. Austrian-born, Scotland-based, with decades of stage work and recordings behind him, he is not someone trying to break into the industry. So when he puts out something new, there is a certain confidence to it that you pick up on pretty quickly.

“Why Do We Try?” is a pop ballad, and it comes from a pretty specific place. The song is a standalone number from an American musical called The Fall of the Final Curtain, written by Michael Andrew Storm and Meg McAndrew. It follows a character who has spent years in a show that is about to close for good, and the final night hits him hard because he is not sure anything else will ever come close to it. That is the emotional core of the song, and Ferdinand commits to it fully.

The production, handled by Sefi Carmel and Alan Vukelic alongside Ferdinand himself, goes big in the right places. This is not a stripped-back acoustic number. It has the kind of scale you would expect from someone who has done Les Miserables and Jesus Christ Superstar on stage. Ferdinand clearly knows how to fill a song out, and his experience in musical theatre shows in how he handles the dramatic arc of the track.

What works here is the honesty of the performance. The character’s fear that the best is already behind him is a genuinely relatable idea, and Ferdinand does not oversell it. It lands because he plays it straight. If you want to keep up with what he has coming next, follow Ferdinand Rennie on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook.