(Muse)ic: Vol. 1
The songs, new and old, that've been moving me lately.
Part of this newsletter is dedicated to Big Emotion, and I experience that a lot through music. I love everything from the drama of swelling orchestral accompaniment, to a stripped-bare melody someone plucks out on a lone guitar. It makes me clutch my chest? My face scrunches up? If you’re anywhere within my very general vicinity, you’re gonna hear about it.
Upon hearing this for the first time as I listened through the album, I choked out some approximation of a mourning wail, and threw a very betrayed look at the bluetooth speaker it was playing from.
Everything about this speaks to the little hot-eyed demon sitting in my ribcage that’s infatuated with sweetly earnest yearning; the kind of melancholy that you sink your toes into like tide-soaked sand.
This is the wistful lover standing under the lonely streetlight, fingers twisting the stem of a single rose. This is the blood-rush flush of feeling the moment slip away, fizzy and bright and fleeting. Everything is beautiful and everything hurts.
(And the hurt is so, so lovely.)
Like a sizeable chunk of the internet who liked to roam the wilds of YouTube in the 2010s, I was a dodie stan. Through them I eventually found Orla Gartland, and now they’re in a band together, and!! They’re really excellent!!!! This song is so incredibly fun, holy shit. But the complexity of the harmonies? Like, are you kidding me?
The immediate feeling of building excitement, then getting kicked right into a celebratory sense of abandon - this is the soundtrack to your college-indie-coming-of-age-friendship-is-magic main character daydream.
One of my best friends in high school introduced me to Wicked, which is why, after Stephen Schwartz (the composer and lyricist) talked about the story behind writing “For Good”, I sang the whole thing along with them and cried my fucking eyes out while watching this at 5pm with the curtains open in broad daylight, in front of God and all the neighbouring buildings.
Nostalgia is a double-edged sword, friends! Stay vigilant! 🥲
This song fucking slaps, and what I mean by that is the bass line goes SO crazy hard, you have no idea where your face is because it’s been blown off to who even knows what far-flung corner of the Earth exists. Who cares! Wait until you get to the chorus and thank me later.