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 |  A blog about music from my unique perspective (also a spot for some poetry I’ve written) |
A blog, generally about music, usually for projects hosted by Jeff  . I may also write about the 48-Hour Media Prompt Challenge if I don't feel like writing a story or poem inspired by the given song. Other bits of poetry or different topics of discussion might end up here as well.![Merit Badge in WDC Media Prompt
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As I begin writing this post while waiting in line at Walmart, would you believe 2013's Counting Stars started playing overhead? Yep. Good ol' OneRepublic  Stargazing is a deep cut off their 2024 album Artificial Paradise. There's an acoustic version on the Super Deluxe album, and it's hard to choose a favorite. 1R does wonders with acoustics… when they're not too lazy to record a fresh set of vocals over them  Sound: This song has a "vibe-y" sound, classic OneRepublic in all respects: guitar strums, harmonies, echoes, etc. Listening to the original, I'm wondering what exactly the difference is with the acoustic. I'll let you know… Ok, the acoustic begins with a piano rather than a guitar. Ryan speaks into near silence at first, and the instruments are much sparser. I believe they did indeed record a fresh vocal track for this version. It also seems a bit slower, but that's more the pacing of the music than the actual length, which is identical to the original. Oh, there's no drum. That means I can add the acoustic Stargazing to my "no drums" playlist. Which means I should probably go back through the acoustic set and see if any of the others don't have drums either. I was in a bit of a rush when the Super Deluxe Artificial Paradise came out. Hardly had a chance to truly appreciate some of the treasures on it. Theme: Stargazing is one of the cornerstones of AP, shedding more lyrical light on the album's themes and concepts. It speaks with a hint of sadness: "dark side of the moon/ the world looks so blue/ I'ma leave it all behind if I have to…" Remember what I said about "Singapore, by OneRepublic"  painting a musical picture of an alien encounter? Well, Stargazing pretty much paints a lyrical picture of such. The chorus, "top down, now we're beaming up" and "welcome home to the afterglow" as well as the general desire to be removed from the world's pains and sorrows by losing yourself in celestial wonders…Significance: Stargazing was an immediate favorite of mine, one of the AP tracks which fell into the more classic and acoustic category rather than being more electronic or funky. As I listened to this song while condensing my ideas about AP's overarching narrative, I realized I had already tapped into this same idea of running away with aliens, three months before the song appeared! Inspired by Nathan W. Pyle's loveable Strange Planet creatures, I wrote "Little Blue" for Gaby's "Game of Thrones" activity in April of 2024.Enjoy this beautiful, wistful song. Words: 448. |
| My 20th is a deep cut off the 2024 Imagine Dragons album Loom. It's ironic, I'm writing this in one sitting back to back with yesterday's, and the two songs are thematically diametrically opposed, as you might guess by the provocative title. Sound: Gods Don't Pray is built around a surprisingly infectious, bouncy bass line, with edgy synth waves and squelchy little sounds interspersed. Musically it's fairly simple, allowing the words to come through without a lot of fussy effects. Theme: The lyrics are where it's at in this song. This is one of the only songs my bands have recently released which I memorized all the words to quickly. I only remember bits and pieces mostly these days, since I don't write them down by hand anymore (golly, how did I ever have time for that  ) When I first saw the title Gods Don't Pray in the Loom tracklist, I worried it would be a deeply sacrilegious song. ID has previously put out songs discussing Dan Reynolds "Lennon-ish" lack of faith; in 2022's Take It Easy, he declares "they tell me heaven's just a lie—well I'm not surprised!" I didn't need to worry, though, because this song is far more relevant to earthly drama than it is spiritual. Although I will point out that as Dan was raised Mormon, he is familiar with their understanding of humanity eventually achieving divinity. This may have led to his questioning why he should pray and who exactly he would be praying to if he did. There is some dispute over how the song's theme originated in the studio. Dan speaks with a remarkably tidy rhythm: the two verses have a perfect 10-8-10-8 syllable count. I always say he talks more than he sings; in a way, he's really reciting poetry. This relates to his love of 90's hip-hop like Tupac and such. This also makes Gods Don't Pray very easy for me to sing. It's the kind of song I bring with me when I have to walk alone. Where Dan says "love me, hate me and make me ugly, break me and shame me…" it was like a gut punch in my soul when I first heard it. I know exactly how that feels… Significance: Gods Don't Pray captured my fancy in a truly powerful way when I first listened to it. I imagined all sorts of dramatic scenarios, kind of like what you would see in Road to Perdition. As a sensitive person, I avoid watching movies at all costs and instead take satisfaction in songs which give me "movies in my head." One of the scenarios I imagined had to do with the decadence of Rome and the Caesars' tendency to consider themselves gods. A father figure in ancient Rome had complete control over his household and those of his adult children, right down to determining if they lived or died. A situation like this is ripe for horrific distortion. In essence, that is ultimately the working definition of a "God" for Gods Don't Pray: one who holds the power of life and death in their hands. I became so obsessed over this song that during the month of August, when I decided to write something for Steven's fire-themed horror contest, I assumed I would be taking inspiration for a solidly horrifying tale from Gods Don't Pray. I even told him that in a Newsfeed comment, to which he responded dryly, "why am I not surprised?"  It didn't really work that way… the twisted, dysfunctional father-son relationship I had in mind managed to normalize itself, and ultimately the story I hammered out had little to connect it with the things I thought about when I listened to Gods Don't Pray. Indeed, I think I might have had an easier time writing the story if I hadn't been so sure I would be inspired by one specific song. That experience taught me an important lesson about separating my music from my writing. Enjoy… if you can  Words: 681. |
| My 19th is Human, a track off the 2016 OneRepublic album, Oh My My. This is one of the songs I wrote a story to for "Musicology Anthology" last year. I've heard it show up in unexpected places, but that was years ago, so it's basically a deep cut. It is not to be confused with 1R's 2021 album, which is also called Human. (This is one of the reasons why I underline album titles, which are technically supposed to be italicized alongside song titles. Many songs share a title with their respective album or even a different one.) Sound: Human is built around wavy, piano-based synth, almost a dance track. It features a steady high falsetto from lead singer Ryan Tedder; it is briefly electronically modified right before the outro, but most of it is his own skill. I've seen him doing high notes live, and he can handle them. Perhaps most impressive is how much he enjoys doing it. One can sense the honest weariness in Ryan's voice in this song, as he was approaching a breaking point of exhaustion while this album was coming together. He is one of the most enthusiastic, hardest working people I know of, and by 2016 this pace caught up with him. Theme: Ryan tells us that when he finished writing Human, he worried it would be seen as sacrilegious. The band brought the song to the father of one of their members, who happened to be a preacher. He listened to it and approved. The words show us a narrator who has fallen away in his spirituality and is returning to God with questions about why life is so difficult. God comes back with His own question: "how does it feel to be human?" And says He would like to experience our fragile human happiness for "just one day." This is a rather peculiar twist, since according to Christianity God came down to Earth in human form. But it makes for an interesting philosophical inquiry. Ryan Tedder doesn't speak much about his personal faith, but he grew up in a large Christian home, and the basic, wholesome worldview has influenced a lot of his songwriting. In other words, he writes with soul. This song is a more obvious expression of spiritual thought than 1R's usual. Significance: I have always enjoyed the unique, quirky lyrics of Human, and find it going through my head every so often. I did my best to honor it in the 2024 Musicology Anthology. The story I wrote won second place at "Philosophical Musings"
Words: 421. |
| Track #18 is a deep cut from the 2015 Imagine Dragons album Smoke + Mirrors. Sound: Dream is one of only two ID songs I prefer to hear live rather than the original studio track. When I first listened to it off the album, I thought it was slow, dreary and pointless, with a plodding piano line, moaning and groaning, and painfully unhappy lyrics. While browsing YouTube later, I found several live, professionally filmed performances from South America, which entirely changed how I perceived the song. Dream comes alive onstage in so many ways. Seeing the young Dan Reynolds singing his heart out adds sincerity to the whining pathos, and the screaming fans add a haunting background to the vocal harmonies. The moment where I always get goosebumps, however, is at the end, where Dan holds out the mic and the entire audience sings the final post-chorus alone in perfect unison. South American fans are unmatched in their devotion. Theme: Dream deals with the idea of coming of age, seeing real life and realizing it isn't the way you were told, and choosing to retreat into escapism due to an overwhelming sense of helplessness in the face of a broken world. The words show a literary depth and quality of thought, especially in the second verse: "the cries from the strangers out at night/ they don't keep us up at night, we have the curtains drawn and closed." It's all too easy to shut off the news and hide behind ivory walls while others suffer. But what can one lonely soul do about any of it? The cover art by Tim Cantor shows a young girl falling through an abyss, eyes tightly shut as she clutches a partially eaten apple. It is emblematic of loss of innocence, anguish, and escape into tainted imagination.These days, I think we can all agree with Dan: "everything's a mess." Significance: Dream taught me to recognize my pull towards a refusal to acknowledge reality, and understand some of the root causes behind it. It also showed me how beautiful a live performance can be, even if the song isn't one I think I'm interested in. Words: 367. |
| My 17th pick is something a little different: an instrumental deep cut from the OneRepublic 2024 album Artificial Paradise. One of the most underrated and overlooked features of 1R as a band is their instrumental interludes. Songs like Sleep and All Fall Down (2007), Waking Up (2009), Don't Look Down and Au Revoir (2013) and Ships + Tides (2021) contain some amazing musical work, combining the cello, piano, synth and guitar to create magical, atmospheric soundscapes which fuel my imagination. When I saw that Artificial Paradise was going to have two entirely instrumental pieces and one song with almost no words, I knew I would be in for a classic 1R treat. Singapore is exactly the kind of piece I like to see from 1R: slow, dreamy, mystical, and intensely synesthetic, or capable of painting entirely unrelated images within my head. It opens with a simple string and quickly introduces a synth wave and a gentle, faraway vocal (even a faint touch of glockenspiel can be detected…) When I first listened to it, my initial thought, duly noted in my journal, was the opening sounds like "W's and the desert." I suppose the synth waves are "W-shaped." You can decide for yourself what a desert sounds like, particularly one under moonlight. Singapore advances into a suspenseful orchestral buildup, climaxing in a sweeping, swirling web of synths, strings and distant vocal harmonies, which gradually subsides into a peaceful outro, leaving us wondering what quietly momentous event just took place. It feels like the soundtrack for a movie, but if anything that's a rather limiting statement. Rather, Singapore is the movie, all by itself. As I unpacked, analyzed and consolidated the overarching themes of Artificial Paradise, I realized the synesthetic story Singapore is telling is that of an alien encounter, even of being "beamed up" into a new universe. This ties in with the album's at-times wistful themes of dreaming about the West Coast, playful surrealism and questioning what we know about reality, while at the same time holding onto those we have alongside us. The name Singapore is rather meaningless to me. It may be fairly random, in much the same way ID's 2012 track Amsterdam is randomly named. Or it could be that Ryan and the gang were staying in Singapore when they composed it. At any rate, this instrumental piece is a genuinely wonderful treat from OneRepublic, emblematic of what makes them special. Enjoy. Words: 405. |
| My 16th track is a deep cut (at least I think it is… there isn't a music video, but apparently it's one of the band's favorites. I am not familiar with radio, so I don't know if it's present or not…) anyway, it's a track from the Imagine Dragons 2024 album Loom. This song was heavily criticized by the critics, as most ID content is. I think they called it a cross between Jimmy Buffett and hip-hop, or something like that. It seems amusing at first, but the message runs deeper than one might assume. Sound: Take Me to the Beach is "weird," as are all the songs off of Loom. Credit goes once more to the Swedish producer duo Mattman and Robin, who purportedly have a distaste for plain old guitar lines. This one originates out of a strum and a bass, with extra elements such as synths, whistles and layered, modified vocals added in for fun. When I listened to it for the first time, I laughed in childish delight at Dan's lyrical melody. There's something so playful and funny about this song, from the quadruple stacked rhymes to the distinct sound of a can popping open at "gonna spend my days telling them to can it…" When the second chorus begins, you can hear a new, high-pitched sample in the background, which Dan said is one of the highlights of the song for him. He calls it "spaghetti western" and says it reminds him of Tarantino movie soundtracks. This cultural reference goes totally over my sheltered head, but seeing his goofy exuberance about that one stringy little sound makes me smile. You can hear him talking about it and hear the sample by itself here ▼ if you have time to poke through the forty-minute Amazon Music Songline acoustic performance, which includes the band's commentary (while wearing their jammies in the studio  )Theme: Underneath its sunny facade, Take Me to the Beach is at heart an introvert's theme song. Dan Reynolds declares his preference for solitude rather than hanging with the wrong people who will waste his time and energy and bring him down. At the end, he says "I don't have no friends—ask anyone/ I've got me till the end—my favorite one." He's mentioned this apparent self-centered attitude before, particularly in a deep cut off 2021's Mercury Act 1, called #1. "I know what I'm meant to be… when it's all been said and done, I'm still my number one." It's a matter of valuing himself enough to draw the line where he would otherwise be too much of a people pleaser. As one who feels like "peopling" is generally more trouble than it's worth, I deeply identify with this desire to be alone with oneself, and consider Take Me to the Beach a favorite off Loom for its unabashedly inward facing theme. Speaking of "inward facing," I remember being concerned when the Loom tracklist dropped and I saw this title. I didn't want it to be another slightly flirtatious "outward facing" song about Dan's evolving relationships, as the single Nice to Meet You is. Luckily, Take Me to the Beach is nothing of the sort. Significance: Apparently, the Dragons like Take Me to the Beach as much as I do—so much so, they've collaborated with no less than four different international artists to create remixes of it! The only one I can tolerate is the Baker Boy remix, featuring an Australian Aboriginal rapper singing partly in his native language. The others either sound hideous or completely mangle Dan's introvert theme. I especially like watching the Amazon Music Songline acoustic performance of the song. It's one of the only songs performed there which is officially available by itself on YouTube, which means I can download it to keep offline with good audio quality. The rest of the setlist is only available individually as "bootlegged" videos, which are rather slipshod. Enjoy this amusing and multifaceted song. I'm afraid I'll have to embed three different versions of it to plague you with Words: 700. |
| My next choice is a classic U2 song, from their 2000 album All That You Can't Leave Behind. Sound: Beautiful Day has a pretty typical U2 sound, with multidimensional binaural elements and Bono's distinctive, somewhat thin voice. I find that after a while many U2 songs, at least the ones I'm aware of, tend to blur into each other; something about their music seems to lack the unique melodic "fingerprint" type of sound on individual songs which I've grown accustomed to having with 1R and ID. I mean, for example, what's the difference between Beautiful Day and Where The Streets Have No Name? I suppose one would call U2 bland. I find it relaxing, to a point. Theme: What makes U2 stand out from the crowd of older school pop-rock artists for me is the lyrics. Not so much that I find them all profound or even perhaps "interesting," but they're consistently decent and of a more philosophical, metaphorical, or thoughtful bent than the average. Their words are such that I can put on a random song I haven't heard yet and hardly even care what it's saying. In this respect and also as it relates to sonic style, they remind me a lot of Coldplay. These two bands both have reliable, somewhat forgettable lyrics with musical work that can at times feel interchangeable. They make good background music. Beautiful Day is about finding good in whatever you've been given, kind of like the saying "bloom where you are planted." No matter what stress you're going through, there's always another morning, another sunrise. My favorite lines are "see the bird with a leaf in her mouth/ after the flood all the colors came out" (a reference to Noah's ark) and "I know I'm not a hopeless case." Significance: I'd never noticed this song before last year, though I'm sure I must've encountered it. The way I found it is when we were evacuating from Hurricane Milton in October. We drove all day as the rain and wind picked up, and ended up sitting in our car all night at a truck stop just north of the worst of it, because there were no more hotel rooms and it was too intense to drive any further. Sleep was impossible, of course. I was washing up in the restroom the next morning after it blew over, with annoying music blasting over my head. A song began with more quietness and care than the rest. I recognized U2 and discovered Beautiful Day. A more appropriate song would be hard to find for such a moment, where we were grateful to be alive and well. Words: 458. |
| My next choice is another deep cut from the 2015 Imagine Dragons album Smoke + Mirrors. A quietly moody piece, with a cover painting of a lady striking something similar to a ballet or yoga pose, with a flock of white birds above. Artist Tim Cantor has said that he used his wife as the model for this image. Sound: It Comes Back to You begins on the right, with a faint, faraway buildup which comes to both sides and gradually, delightfully layers upon itself, with a full 56 seconds before Dan starts singing. When the final chorus begins, it ushers in a twinkling keyboard sweep, adding a dreamy, mystical touch. There is no bombast or shouting in this song; if anything, it sounds very much like a lullaby, with a hint of strings, a relaxing melodic pattern, and a soothing background vocal. Theme: It Comes Back to You deals with general feelings of lying awake at night, wondering what's become of your life. I pointed out on Genius that mockingbirds like to sing at around 4AM, predawn. Thus we see, even though "I have thought of greater things," the narrator is reduced to pondering something as meaningless as why a mockingbird is calling outside his window in the wee hours. One of my favorite lines is "you could call it cowardice, but leave me to my studied bliss…" I was quite surprised when I first learned lead singer and lyricist Dan Reynolds is an introvert. It seemed so unlikely that such a funny, warm-hearted and naturally friendly guy would rather spend time alone. I contrasted his genuinely good, almost innocent personality with my own tendency to be a grumpy, cynical, inconsiderate grouch. Yet as I became more familiar with his words I came to understand his conflict between being a sincere people pleaser and taking time to care for his own mental health, even to removing himself from stressful situations or hangers-on. Another favorite line, which I've incorporated into many an art piece over the years, is "am I just a shadow you drew?" I find this a profoundly haunting question, to which there is no easy answer as I evaluate my self-esteem and sense of purpose in an increasingly difficult world. Significance: This is a treasured favorite off the album for many reasons. Though a deep cut, it has appeared in some unexpected places. One time in 2018, I was shopping with my mom at the Belk's department store in Tennessee. In those days I struggled with narcolepsy, and I was quite literally falling asleep in the dressing rooms as she tried on clothes. The store had no WiFi, and my smartphone was an old one without a plan, so I had nothing to do but listen to the in-store music, most of which was incredibly boring indie pop. Imagine my surprise and delight when I recognized the slow, gentle opening of this song. It couldn't have come at a better time. I was so excited to meet it, I actually recorded the experience on my phone, since I was unable to use Google Sound Search for a screenshot. More recently, It Comes Back to You has appeared at a sophisticated chain of gas stations I visit frequently, repeating several times on their vast playlist in 2024. I marveled at this and wondered if it had been added as a sort of "advertising" buildup to the album's tenth anniversary. The song has inspired several art pieces of mine, most of which I'd have to dig through my cloud storage to find and share. In honor of the tenth anniversary and the upcoming Reflections album, I recently doodled a little pen-and-ink image reinterpreting the Smoke + Mirrors cover art. It's horrible, but I haven't drawn on paper in years and my skills were never that great. I'll embed my lightly digitized version here… Another thing the song inspired is "What's Her Story #47" , a sweet little flash fiction entry I wrote for "Game of Thrones" in April 2024.Enjoy the melody of slumbering dragons   Words: 690. |
| Next up is a deep cut from the 2016 OneRepublic album Oh My My. It's called by a trendy abbreviation for the word "Neighborhood." Sound: Totally eerie, with lots of reverb and a touch of background fuzz (I questioned the integrity of my earbuds while writing this…) Ryan Tedder shouts the chorus and speaks the verses, without too much of his signature melisma. Perhaps the most striking part of NbHD is when the lady, Santigold, enters at the bridge. It's hard to not get goosebumps as she builds her part up to the final chorus. I'm not familiar with her, but I really admire what she contributes to this song. Theme: Ryan has said that NbHD is a song about the refugee crisis… which is enough to know. I mean to say, I hardly need to figure out which crisis he might have had in mind. There are so many refugees in today's world, both physical and metaphorical. He employs language so symbolic and cryptic, it fills my head with ideas far and wide. This song was just waiting for a story to be written from it, which leads me to… Significance: NbHD has captured my imagination since I discovered it in 2017, with its mysterious drama and poignant message. When I chose Oh My My as my album to write to for last year's "Musicology Anthology" I was especially excited to bring this track to life.Last summer, I was steeped in Islamic evangelism because my mom would binge watch Dr. Zakir Naik and other Muslim teachers every evening. I picked up little idiosyncrasies of the culture, and channeled them into the story for NbHD, trying to capture the theme of Middle Eastern refugees while maintaining a strictly fantasy setting. The story I came up with won second place at "Senior Center Forum" and a glowing review from a fellow author.This is a song I'll always appreciate on many levels.
Words: 323. |
| My twelfth pick is from the sophomore Imagine Dragons album celebrating its tenth anniversary this year: Smoke + Mirrors. This song is the title track, with the only difference being the word "and" is spelled out instead of the album title's plus sign. It showcases S+M's trademark mystical, moody sound and searching, metaphorical themes, and is one of my favorites off the album. The single art Tim Cantor painted for it shows a man's face doubling out… I did not understand the full significance of this until one dreary afternoon when I was listening to ID to keep myself awake and happened to stare into a mirror. I was so tired, my eyes crossed, or came unfocused—and my own face doubled out in front of me. Hence we see the painting of an exhausted man apparently gazing at himself in a mirror.Sound: Smoke and Mirrors starts off quietly, with a slow, whispering melody. Dan sounds as if he's coming in from a distance. Then, shortly before the fifty second mark, the drums come crashing in as he shouts a desperate plea to "open up my mind!" and the chorus flows through. Once the chorus is over, it settles softly again into the second verse, and the cycle repeats. Then the bridge draws it down to eerie stillness under his voice, and the chorus repeats one last time. Then comes the most beautiful part: an all-too-brief, haunting guitar solo, perfectly expressing everything which came before. Theme: Smoke and Mirrors is a song about losing your beliefs and how this loss shakes you to the core, leaving you floundering in darkness. Dan Reynolds was going through a period of deep depression as S+M came together. He was fronting a band exploding into worldwide fame, and he'd been chasing the road for several years, touring their debut album Night Visions (2012), while at the same time being newly married and a father. For a young man stepping out of a close-knit Mormon family, this was a lot to handle. Dan struggled with doubts about Mormonism from a teenager; even as the church sent him on a proselytizing trip to the wilds of Omaha, Nebraska, after graduating high school, he felt sorely conflicted in attempting to convert people to a religion he barely accepted himself. This deep-seated conflict and doubt about letting go of the faith he'd grown up with, along with the stresses of suddenly being on the road and famous, shaped most of the gloomy themes of S+M. Significance: My first explorations of S+M took place on a holiday in Naples, Florida, in early spring of 2018, and the album so intertwined itself with that vacation, they're almost inseparable. I marveled at the peculiarities of spring in a tropical climate, and mourned missing out on the irises and cherry blossoms of my native Tennessee springtime. I met grackles for the first time and had to force myself to regard them with some amount of respect, otherwise finding these ugly pests quite repulsive compared to the robins, chickadees and cardinals of my home state. The swarms of iridescent black birds and general sense of loss and misplacement seemed to perfectly match the moody surrealism of Smoke + Mirrors. I clung to these songs and the art associated with them as a window to teach me how to process the confusion I felt, learning to acknowledge, appreciate and express life's darker emotions. Having now been "trapped" in Florida since 2019, I've grown accustomed to never being quite sure what season it is. The sense of "smoke and mirrors" every time I see an unseemly swirl of dead live oak leaves has faded, and I don't view the album in quite the same way as I used to, which is probably a good thing. Still, I appreciate what I've learned from this collection of multimedia art and how much it means to me. I will be exploring several more tracks off S+M throughout the month to honor its tenth anniversary. Words: 684. |
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