Angel in the Melody
"What's remembered, lives"—Nomadland
It's another month, and I'm trying to remember, collect everything I forgot.
I often find myself alone, sitting or reclining, and then picking carefully from a row of memories as I would nicely, stacked music cassettes on a shelf. It is always about which tapes of memory matter, which moments will keep me engaged as I spend hours feasting on their chords, notes, and rhythms.
My musical repertory is a timestamp of memories: measured moments, lassoed longings, and unresolved sensations. I recollect past happenings quicker through music. Like landmarks, whenever I stumble on an old song on the radio, when someone around me hums a tune, when a speaker blasts it away at the roadside, or when a friend is playing it on their smartphone, I am aware of where I was the moment I first heard the song. I am jolted back to a particular period in time. These songs have blended with the time of their discovery and taken a certain flavour as they're committed to memory.
All Things Bright and Beautiful was released in 2011. I would listen to it eight years later. I would discover it in 2019, a year before the COVID-19 pandemic, when we were desperately looking for even the slightest shimmer of succour, and this album would become an extension of myself, a rope I'd hold on to, a companion and comfort, as I lived vicariously via the songs.
National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), I'd join other eager and unwilling graduates for a mandatory one-year national paramilitary programme. First, it begins as a three weeks orientation camping experience where these graduates—corps members—are groomed like soldiers in a sequestered location. Second, they are each posted to their Place of Primary Assignment, to a location within the country to serve a public or private institution for a year as a staff. Third, these graduates receive a certificate at the completion of service. Service to my country began after I found myself flung to a distant part of Oyo State— Ibarapa—where the music of nature was unceasing, but the gyre of civilisation was absent. But it was during this twenty-one-day regimented camping period, away from the eyes of family and the ears of friends, away from simple pleasures of daily freedom, that I did find myself latching onto music as a crutch, as a salve, as a coping mechanism.
Music, like writing, is a kind of salvation. If I don't write, I might implode. If I do write, there's a tendency to second-guess myself, to seek external validation. I struggle to read through my published stories. I dislike them after they have been published. I do this often because I come across expressions I should have written better. I see sentence bones that could have been shaved cleaner. And in my judgement, I forget the effort of editors in the work. On days when I can't write, when there is a drought of inspiration, when I can't seem to parse thoughts into words and words to letters, music comes along, stretching out its hand and pulling me towards clarity.
I commuted long distances with "Angels" on repeat. It's the third track of the album and my favourite. Once, I engaged in a four-hour journey from Ibadan to Ibarapa in a grotty van. The heat of the engine and the dusty seat was an unwelcome reveal. I found it all too strange, all too ominous, that I was the only youth nestled among old men and women. The route we plied had become recently notorious for ambuscade by cattle herders. But jettisoning all fear, and held up by the wonder of the song, I bobbed my head to the bumping of our vehicle on the countless potholes and endless strip of uneven asphalt sandwiched between thick, canopied bushes. Sometimes, hope may be found in a melody.
"Wake me if you're out there!" Is the first line from "Angels." Owl City yell-sings this, calling to us to see with him and marvel at the entity he has noticed. He repeats this expression throughout the song. I saw this as his way of connecting to the experience, not wanting to let go of something magical, terminal. S once argued with me that Owl City used angels as a metaphor for aliens. I disagreed. I told him it was about angels. We went back and forth on it till I played it from my phone and he finally conceded. He said it was a long time ago he heard the song. Perhaps his memory failed him. Perhaps memories aren't time-proof.
Sometimes I air-piano when I listen to a song, especially if I've become enthralled by it, especially if I just recently discovered it. I play it and binge-listen to the point where I've sapped every juice of its rhythm and melody. I often wonder if the artiste grows sore and begs for a rest after performing nonstop for me.
I sometimes shout and scream to the lyrics of a song while having my headphones on. I dance, too, like I'm in a frenzy. Trance-like. Ancient Greek poets sought the Muse in order to write or deliver a performance on stage for their all-seeing spectators. An NYSC roommate once thought I was going mad when he noticed my strange animations. I was only being lifted into another realm by the Muse. I was only following tradition.
Owl City said, in an interview, about angels: "I definitely do believe they exist and I wanted to write a song to touch on that belief." I used to believe I was a great singer. I still do. As a teenager, while bathing or doing house chores, my voice always sounded sweet. I would sing in notes higher than my normal range and tell myself that I'd one day be a pop star in a boy band. It wasn't until I got admitted to the university that a friend told me that all my singing was in falsetto. I was ashamed.
All Things Bright and Beautiful is inspired by an Anglican hymn by Cecil Frances. Innocence and hope reverberate between both works, a clear indication of Owl City's faith. As little school children, we recited Frances' composition on our assembly grounds. While I found the piece a little too long to commit to memory, I found the refrain delightful.
I don't stream songs—I prefer to download them outright. I find that streaming is like having something but not really having it. Streaming is like renting a movie disk but not having your own copy. Streaming is like window shopping, like the transfixed gaze of a broke woman at the roadside, staring at her dream gem forever caged in the étagère of a store.
J and I were friends and classmates in the university, and our relationship bore on in camp. In my first week in Ibadan, after getting transferred from Ibarapa, after spending a lot on junk food, she came to me with groceries and other foodstuff. An act of kindness that continuously loops in my mind. It is incredible how we can remember things that seem negligible in the present but in hindsight were our saving grace. It is incredible how we have selective amnesia.
The opening instrumental of "Dreams Don't Turn to Dust" makes my head quake, a rush of blood quickening. I feel something leaving my body; like air, like cold, like sadness. The title of the song also carries an entendre that speaks to me in the most personal, affectionate way. At first it sounds like affirmation; dreams don't turn to dust. It then morphs into orisons, wishes, hopes: dreams don't turn to dust. Other times I cannot but see how it stares at me as I stare at it: doubts.
Often, when I search for something in haste, I forget where I kept it. It happens, too, when I have so many things on my mind. I once misplaced a folder containing all my academic documents because I was preoccupied with finding a befitting Place of Primary Assignment, just a few days after I was despatched from camp and I was just settling in Ibadan. I would get a call later in the day to come pick it up from a convenience store I had visited in the morning. I wonder if my dreams would've died that day.
Much of this essay is about memory and music. Feelings. Wishes. Vistas. Songs refracting nostalgia. Collating and archiving extant perceptions. Holding on to something to either pull me up or down. I wonder if there are people like me who spend half their days replaying memories but always find a way to let moments slip by them.
Owl City is the stage name for alternative-pop musician Adam Young. Young made me break the one rule I kept. It wasn't a rule per se. It was only something I never thought I'd do: follow a celebrity on social media. I'm very selective of my music—and while I listen to all genres, I don't stan artistes. I followed him on Twitter, liked a few of his posts, retweeted some. It felt like a necessary change for me. A few weeks later, I unfollowed him.
I like how songs can ferry you to different batches of memories happening everywhere all at once. Some songs have tentacles, tendrils that attach to thoughts of the present, past and future. And so, it bothers me a lot when a song has bad, incomprehensible lyrics. It bothers me when a song subsists only on its beats, its instrumentals. I find it awkward, like how "turmeric" sounds like an adjective, but is a noun.
"Kamikaze" makes me think about my essence and existence. These thoughts come through the beat, riffs, and synth. It's a song that makes so much sense and makes none at the same time. It comes with a frisson that wafts up and falls, as a window opens and closes. Whenever it plays, I'm transported to a world free of stress, of happiness absolute, and of a dreamy future. In the post-chorus, where rhythm, instrumentals, and vocals blend, I always seek the one rapture of living: "Break down the open road! Maybe I'll ride / And fight back the overtow! To save my life / Bring in the ember glow! Maybe I'll fly / And go where you wanna go! With your eagle eye."
Once I was on a road trip with friends to the suspended lake in Ado-Awaye. As we journeyed through the wide, poorly-constructed road littered with inselbergs, and shifting between panic and anxiety, I became entranced by the ebullient touch of "Kamikaze." Maybe because it translates from the Japanese as "divine wind"—it welled up my geyser of feelings. Maybe it's because I visualise my past meddling with my present, bringing forth a dialectical tension between my flesh and my spirit. Maybe.
It intrigues me when I find people who listen to songs while reading a book, studying, or sleeping. I often wonder how they do it. My closest pal during service, D, always began and ended each day with music blaring from the speaker of his phone. For him, it was therapeutic. To me, it was cacophonous.
Love songs sound like the taste of bitter leaf, like a fugitive laughter in a serious gathering, when you have no one to hold as yours.
"I wish that we could sail our sad days away / Forever," I sing the beginning of this chorus wholeheartedly whenever "The Yacht Club" comes on. It's the typical love song, and Young delivers with aplomb. I consummate this song as a love letter to Ibadan. A love letter to my daily haunts of the Ministry of Tourism, riding on the now extinct ORide. A love letter to the weekly convocation of corps members and myself at the NYSC secretariat, inventing ways to service and develop our community. A love letter to the times I encountered the varied and wild faunae around my residence—reptiles, aves and mammals. A love letter to days of past futures.
I take off my earpiece or turn down the volume of what I'm listening to, just to smell things. Isn't it possible to activate all senses at once? Synaesthesia?
When I see people, I think of them as vessels. I think of life. I think of dreams. I think of love. I think of death. And I find it easy to warm up to people and become friends with them, and I find it easy to remember good deeds of people even after we've become estranged, and I find it easy to forget about people I barely know, after they die.
In "Shy Violet," Young sings: "She dried my eyes and drifted off / While every tear was held aloft / The heavy rain clouds felt terrible / 'Cause she made my stormy sky beautiful." O was my shy violet, my first true love; our love was brief and intense. A year after our parting, we met again at a cinema. In the hall, we wrapped our arms around each other's bodies and smelled each other's heat and breathed each other's scents. In our silence was the hope our relationship had turned out differently. At the parking lot, in her car, we made out as our final goodbye, one last hurrah, a sad memento.
"Shy Violet" appears only in German iTunes and the Japanese edition of All Things Bright and Beautiful. It's not on Spotify. A song that echoes all my sensations of love and lust found it hard to climb up in the tracklist of the album. I wonder why musicians omit some songs from their albums.
I like the up-and-coming artistes, the rookies. I root for them. I pray for them. I earnestly wait for them to have a hit and to grow bigger than the limelight. But oftentimes, they grow too big and lose all their lustre and spectre and wonder. And I revert to being a bad-belle, a hater. There is a sinister joy knowing you're one of an artiste's few listeners.
All Things Bright and Beautiful got mixed to negative reviews. Billboard said: "The dozen tracks of effervescent, shimmering, faith-based synth pop blend Young's adenoidal, Warped tour-ready vocals with a decidedly '80s new wave flavour." Megan Ritt of Consequence controverts: "Overall, All Things Bright and Beautiful isn't a bad album; it's just not very interesting." I like to believe no one formulates their opinions based on critics' reviews.
More often than not, I discover new songs through movies. "Movie mining" is the expression I have coined for it to show how I fix my eyes on the screen and tune my ears to the most trifling of sounds. My mind scours the possibility of googling the song as it plays when the end credits roll in. Isn’t it funny how you watch some movies and find its soundtrack the only memorable thing in it?
Note to self: separate the artiste from the person. But should I still actively listen to their songs if they are bigots or sexual offenders?
Recently, I took a personality test, and it diagnosed me as open-minded but with high levels of neuroticism. Maybe this explains the reason I seek closure with my memories; how no one seems to think about these things like I do; how no one knows about these experiences from five years ago that keep me up at night; how I'm trying to let these memories go but honouring them with their flowers.
Live más. Live more. I'm caught in a vortex of trying to recollect fragmented memories. Memory is but collected slivers of moments. Like fingerprints; so vast, so different. And music is the closest thing I have to a time machine.
In 2023, Young released Coco Moon, his seventh studio album. It didn't quite have that magic.
I think the choice of trusting our memories, even though we know time will eventually stall the health of our brains, making them degenerate and decay, seems like no choice at all. Universal truth.
About himself, Young commented: "If I wasn't making music, I don't know what I'd be doing. I wouldn't be happy." I wouldn't, either.
Replaying every song on All Things Bright and Beautiful and realising it's a soulful journey is wearing the young wrinkles of an old smile, is climbing up on a rope that takes you to a place you call home, is saving an experience in a time capsule, revisiting it again and again, is having an album more familial than familiar.
Collected thoughts.
