[This piece is written around lyrics from the songs that I love. Lyrics that had an impactful meaning.]
I have built a very special thing for my thoughts in my music library.
The albums there are like monuments, creating a map of the transitions I’ve made in my life. And the music holds all of it so well. It goes beyond memories, it is like actual fragments of my personhood and of my life. It is about how when a song comes on, I am sometimes taken back to the moment I heard it for the first time. How it sounded to me then, the ethos and emotion of that specific world.
The tiny sliver of my life crammed into that time. And how it is always there for me to go back to. Always.
Growing is a good thing, it is filled with important changes. But one problem with growing is that you never realise when it is actually happening. You never feel as though you are growing, you only look back and see how much you have grown.
There are unfortunately no step-by-step records of our lives as we go through the whole process of growing. Growing up, growing older, or growing into a new self.
What we have are signposts along the way, landmarks, like the ones on the road that tell you “Welcome to newtown”. Or the ones that are helpful, like a premonition and say through some vague yet unshakable feeling “’Newplace’ 5 kilometres ahead”.
And sometimes, the signal is just this; hey, look up, you are here.
Recently, I took a walk. It was a regular long walk along a regular street I have walked on many, many times. And nothing has really changed along that street in the years I have known it, but something about it had changed. It was something subtle, a thing I could not really place a definition on right away.
The houses were the same, the trees and the big skyline.
But I didn’t have to think too long to figure it out.
That maybe what had changed was how I looked at it. And the way I saw it had changed perhaps because I too had changed.
So when I looked up from whatever it is that I was thinking of, there was a quieter, different world than the one I used to know.
And like the song that plays through the radio on a very long car ride, or like the ones I listened to through earphones on that walk, music punctuated the slow change in daily life for me. Made it appear flat out and solid, like a journey I had taken.
It made the difference stark in how my worldview had shifted, how my emotional landscape was more fleshed out. And of course, the nostalgia. That powerful, humbling thing. Even if it could not show where I should go next, it at least wove a map to show me all of the places I had been. All the paths I had taken to get here.
I went through my music library to sketch out that map properly for this post. Create something specific for me to remember how it has been so far in the years I have been taking long walks on that street. I wanted to piece together worlds the music had created, and which I have gratefully inhabited. So this is the post.
[I have linked the titles of the songs to places you can listen to them]
Well, first, Take off with me.
I think I should introduce this ‘playlist’ with one of many songs a lot of people might not know about.
It is from the album, Fly Exam by JGivens.
This is not the song I listened to most on the album, or loved the most really. But I think there was something defining about that time of my life when I first heard it.
In this song, where the chorus (or hook, whichever it is called), goes
Sky might die and just hit the floor, I might fly on my tippy toes. Really don’t know. [Still feels good to me!]
Really don’t know.
Everyone goes through a stage in their life when they really, genuinely do not know. Don’t know what is going on, what is next. Possibly do not even know what you really want to know.
And it doesn’t feel good.
I am much less interested in fitting myself into that sonic, or mind space of protracted confusion. But this song was a friend to me during that time. Something I really needed to give clarity. Because sometimes, the clearest thing [ironically] that you need to set straight first is, to admit that you simply do not know.
That leads to real, lasting improvement in the way a person thinks, and it diffuses on into other parts of one’s life. I guess it did that for me.
A girl, Pure Heroine
I will not pick out a single song off this album. Because for me Lorde’s first LP was a singular body of work, and I consider it to be so because it is largely a consideration of a specific idea; teen angst.
I listened to the album maybe a year or so after it came out, coinciding with my own adolescence/post-adolescence, something.
And I love this album so much that I had to distance myself from it for a while so I could you know, grow up.
There are many lyrics that stand out to me on this entire album that expressed what I was experiencing in my own life so articulately. Yet, what draws me to it might be something that could push people away from the album- just all of the mellow tones, the understated, sparse music.
But it is exactly what I like, all of that empty space in the music that gives your own mind licence to weave your own world into it.
It is simultaneously background music and music you can just melt into in a sense. I still think some of the songs on the album are glorious.
And this line especially from 400 lux [a lovely synth-infused track],
I love these roads where the houses don’t change
I used to think about how boring it is that things around you don’t change, yet everything inside of you is metamorphosing so quickly. It is what I like about that line, that song, the album, it spectacularly holds that fragile idea of adolescence [and maybe life in general], you changing irreverently while all the houses on the streets you know stay the same.
And yet this world, How big, How blue, How beautiful, is it?
Very, very beautiful. And big.
But not very blue, if blue means sad or underwhelming, or you know blue.
That might be the big gift of the pandemic, and the time spent in lockdowns. I had a lot of time to realise that, going outside is actually great.
There is a nice, big world I have to see and I am committed to seeing.
Of course, that is not what Florence Welch’s track, or the album the track was similarly named after was talking about.
[I had to go back to give it a listen here]
Really, the whole album contains Florence’s standard powerful vocals [borderline screaming], and it alternates between very classical, melodramatic rock, and then tapers down in many sections to quiet, introspective sounds. [Sometimes this dichotomy appears on the same track]
What lyric stood out on this album for me? Maybe this
So much time on the other side, waiting for you to wake up
That, as odd as it is might just be apt. Wake up, and go and spend time outside in your real life.
New world, New Year?
Maybe.
Did you have any New Year resolution, or goal this year? You know, considering what last year looked like.
Well, I did. It was the same as last year; generally chill out and do great work.
Asa’s song New Year from her 2014 album Bed of Stone, is something that challenges me. It does so in the way that it speaks about the future, a thing we have such little control over, as though it were a celebration, now.
The thing this song does that the first track I reference in this entry (Take off with me), is that it talks about dealing with change and uncomfortable situations (and wrong decisions) in a more forgiving way; you just have to know when to quit.
It is a valuable lesson in creating art, in living generally. It is true that a certain level of grit is required to do great things, or even good, decent things, but it takes a certain kind of shrewdness to let go of the things that hold us down. Whether an idea, a person, a job, or anything.
And it takes a certain kind of courage, that I am learning to have again, to look at the future with not only hope but a certain kind of celebration in seeing that well, at least I came this far and there are still many chances to figure it out.
Might be cliché but
I know I can’t change the past, but as the river keeps flowing,
I’ll keep on moving on.
Then all the other songs not mentioned here.
I still love so many other songs, but this entry can only be so long.
Music has always been a part of my life. And I do not even want to get into the nostalgia from the late 2000’s, the time I discovered radio shows that played some of my favourite pop songs, and ignited my strange on-and-off love for pop music.
I haven’t even gone into examining Nigerian music, which has been interesting me more and more in the past year with all the newer artists.
Anyways, I would love to know how many of these songs you like, or know about.
And what songs have struck you, stayed with you. Or just jarred you after you listened to them recently, did they make you feel like you had changed since the last time you listened to them?
Let me know.