Music Notes

Smoke and Mirrors, by ID

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.