Trevor Powers, you raided my soul.
I have been listening to the Youth Lagoon album "The Year of Hibernation" at work a lot while burning through piles of transcripts and request e-mails. I find it uplifting and helpful when I need to rise above the tedium. One of my few complaints with the album is that I can't readily understand what the lead singer is saying and I'm a very lyrically-driven listener.
The songs on this album are similarly structured and usually start quiet, progressively adding layers of sound, instruments, and volume. They are built around major chord structures and so it's a positively dreamy album, a la Camera Obscura, except with falsetto male vocals and less retro sound. Good driving beats on the toms too.
It's not what I would listen to to get my engine running in the morning but it's a great background soundtrack, as I have mentioned already. So today during a spare moment when I was marvelling at the beautiful sonic swell in the last two minutes of the track "July" I thought, I should look into what this guy is actually saying. This is what I found:
Explosions pillaging the night
From the fireworks on the fourth of July
It's just my lady, our friends, and I
Smoking cigars and yelling at cars as they drive by
We scaled a ladder ascending to the roof
While five years ago I wept and no one knew
Holding my guitar, I strummed a tune
I sang "I love you but I have to cut you loose"
As the neighbor lights off the small bombs we watch
from the rooftop... safely, so safely
If I had never let go, then only God knows where I would be now
I made a bridge between us then I slowly burned it
Five years ago, in my backyard I sang love away
Little did I know that real love had not quite yet found me
Now, tomorrow is the 4th of July. I will be on a rooftop at some point tomorrow night. There will be fireworks, and my heart has the same conclusion in it as this song ends with. If you know me (which you probably do because no one who doesn't know me reads this) you may know something about my love life though I'm pretty private about it in conversation. I only talk to my blog, apparently (sidenote: yikes...). Anyway, Trevor Powers (YL's mastermind) must have gone through something a lot like I did for him to be able to write this. This just reinforces my deep respect for people who can create such beautiful expressions for conveying sentiment and set them to a melody. I've included a link to the song below. Enjoy listening to a little bit of my soul being sung.
The songs on this album are similarly structured and usually start quiet, progressively adding layers of sound, instruments, and volume. They are built around major chord structures and so it's a positively dreamy album, a la Camera Obscura, except with falsetto male vocals and less retro sound. Good driving beats on the toms too.
It's not what I would listen to to get my engine running in the morning but it's a great background soundtrack, as I have mentioned already. So today during a spare moment when I was marvelling at the beautiful sonic swell in the last two minutes of the track "July" I thought, I should look into what this guy is actually saying. This is what I found:
Explosions pillaging the night
From the fireworks on the fourth of July
It's just my lady, our friends, and I
Smoking cigars and yelling at cars as they drive by
We scaled a ladder ascending to the roof
While five years ago I wept and no one knew
Holding my guitar, I strummed a tune
I sang "I love you but I have to cut you loose"
As the neighbor lights off the small bombs we watch
from the rooftop... safely, so safely
If I had never let go, then only God knows where I would be now
I made a bridge between us then I slowly burned it
Five years ago, in my backyard I sang love away
Little did I know that real love had not quite yet found me
Now, tomorrow is the 4th of July. I will be on a rooftop at some point tomorrow night. There will be fireworks, and my heart has the same conclusion in it as this song ends with. If you know me (which you probably do because no one who doesn't know me reads this) you may know something about my love life though I'm pretty private about it in conversation. I only talk to my blog, apparently (sidenote: yikes...). Anyway, Trevor Powers (YL's mastermind) must have gone through something a lot like I did for him to be able to write this. This just reinforces my deep respect for people who can create such beautiful expressions for conveying sentiment and set them to a melody. I've included a link to the song below. Enjoy listening to a little bit of my soul being sung.
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