Welcome to This Month in 5 Songs. I now have 8 unfinished drafts in my unpublished folder waiting for their day in the sun… but alas, here’s more music in the meantime.
When I was a kid, September always signaled the start of the school year. In the present, I’m finding myself at a new beginning, too. I think as breaks go, my summer felt at the same time restorative & reflective as it did self-imploding & anxious—a weird blend, without a doubt. But as the month has gotten underway, I feel a turning point within myself and a readiness to create again with a different perspective than I had earlier this year. With the ground feeling a little less shaky, I think I’m finally taking the steps.
01. 🎵 nostalgia by JUNNY and JAY B
Score another one for K-Pop because, damn, this song is so beautiful. Right from the opening verse, the line “I'm just sitting here chasing a feeling I can't explain” struck me; it felt like this was what I spent my whole summer doing. I find that most songs about nostalgia are about past loves (as I believe this one is, too), but I experience it as an illusion that memories and stories create about what my life was like—past tense. It’s as if I’m watching a movie inspired by true events but not the true events themselves. It traps me in this cycle of Rosy Past, Dissatisfied Present, Worried Future. But the paradox is: I was likely feeling dissatisfied in that rosy past’s present.
I love the question posed in this song: “Nostalgia, tell me, please. Where did we go wrong?” Maybe the singer is using “we” to refer to themselves and a lost love, but I kind of took “we” as the singer and nostalgia itself. I tend to look to the past and future as though they can answer the questions I fail to understand in the present, but I have this sneaking suspicion that I’m looking in the wrong places.
02. 🎵 What Was I Made For by Billie Eilish
I’m not going to comment on the Barbie movie here, but I did find myself feeling emotionally moved whenever this piano melody underscored a scene from the film. The emotional honesty of this song feels relatable to almost all humans, regardless of our seat in life, what we do, and how we live. As someone who thinks endlessly about existential dilemmas and deeper meanings (can’t you tell? 🙄), what’s presented here is spot on to me. I don’t necessarily “get it” or have an answer to the questions I ask myself, but it shouldn’t preclude me from trying to figure it out in the bumbling way only humans know how.
03. 🎵 SeeThru by Tim Atlas
Ethereal, dancey, lovely. There’s something irresistible to me about songs you think you could hear in a club or something but have lyrics that ask bigger things of us, like What is reality? Are our feelings real? Or in the chorus, “Am I somebody?” And maybe the solution is to just dance to it in this moment.
04. 🎵 Lust for Life by Girls
An old favorite of mine. I hear this song and I’m instantly hooked on it, then I forget about it for a while. When it comes back to me, I’m back to being hooked. It’s a short song where the singer reflects on things they wish they had because “maybe then [they] could have turned out right.” The list spans from having pizza and a bottle of wine to having a healthy father figure. It sounds comically exaggerated, but aren’t we all like that? I think about my own art practice and find myself always wishing for a real studio, a city where things could be remotely affordable, mentors when I was growing up who would’ve nourished my creativity instead of discouraging it, because maybe then I’d be this unstoppable successful artist or something. It really does seem like “lust” describes it well. You don’t think you’ll be satisfied until you have those things, but it’s all just small stuff that might scratch the itch instead of actually healing the wound.
05. 🎵 Angels Like You by Miley Cyrus
I first heard this song only a few months ago when I stumbled upon this clip of her live rehearsal. All I could think was, “Whoa.” and her voice really stood out to me like crystal-clear bell chimes. There is so much heartbreak and heaviness in the line, “I’m everything they said I would be.” which is so beautifully contrasted with the lightness of an angel flying. It reminds me a lot of the crushing and oppressive weight of others’ expectations and ideas of you, and when those ideas become mixed with your own identity, you feel as if you don’t deserve the good things you have, nor can you cherish them properly.
I usually pull songs off of my mental shelf that I’m into lately, not necessarily trying to make them jive as a set. But upon writing this, I really feel an invisible thread that binds these particular songs. Themes of questioning, doubt, feeling, searching. Just some classic textbook human confusion that has been a significant part of my summer, but if I’m to be truly honest, probably the past few years of my life.
In my own personal work right now, I’m learning to accept that my MO at a specific point in my development—say as a kid or teenager—made perfect sense at that moment in time. It’s when I look at it too critically with the perspective I have now as someone older that I feel embarrassment and shame, like I should have known better.
I think about the songs I listened to at that age; I was an emo kid through and through. What was so hard about my life that I gripped onto the angsty lyrics of those bands for dear life? What was so appealing to me about, “I’m just a kid and life is a nightmare” from Simple Plan? Or, “They say you need to pray if you want to go to heaven / But they don't tell you what to say when your whole life has gone to hell” by Brand New?
When I listen to those songs now, I laugh at how cringy some of the lyrics are, but I also feel a lot of… fondness. (Is it nostalgia?) With the right amount of distance, I could easily be critical of the person I used to be, but I also can’t deny the kindness I feel towards my younger self… because that person’s non-fully-formed brain was still trying to make sense of the world. And they were doing their best. There was a lot they didn’t yet understand. How could I fault them?
I’m trying to bring this into the present where every other month I feel like a hot mess of existential dread who’s perpetually confused about their direction in life, can’t muster the energy or motivation to make art consistently, and struggles with an arresting level of future-tripping. When I think about myself in terms of Some Idealized Adult Figure, it makes complete sense that I feel like one who very much does not have their shit together when I should “at this age.”
But this arc of life is long (if we’re so lucky). Somewhere along the line, we were told that you only get maybe 18 years to Not Know as a young person but from that point on, you’re supposed to suddenly have it all together for the rest of your days? Nah. I don’t buy that.
Right now, the reality is: I’m figuring things out. Maybe my brain is fully formed (maybe.), but I’m still trying to make sense of what’s happening right here, right now. I don’t want to wait for time to pass before I can love and empathize with that person. I want to be kind to the very truthful me of the present.