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 |  A blog about music from my unique perspective (also a spot for some poetry I’ve written) |
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| 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. |
| My eleventh track for "The Soundtrack of Your Life" is another one from OneRepublic's 2024 album Artificial Paradise. Room For You is a deep cut, one which I didn't think especially highly of when it came out. In fact, I don't think I listened to it more than once last summer after the initial analysis loop. It just didn't seem to connect with me. Being a deep cut, I was quite surprised to run into it playing on a gas station sound system less than a week ago. As I listened I found myself unable to remember what I was hearing beyond the initial recognition, and I felt strange, because it's not a bad song at all, and in fact I'd already chosen it as one of the tracks for this blog series! It's highly unusual for me to not bond with a OneRepublic song. Sound: Room For You has fairly typical OneRepublic production, with a hint of the postmodern "cyberspace" sonic patterns which drift through the album. A little bit of piano synth, a guitar strum, backing vocals, and a somewhat rappy verse delivery which swings through different rhythms in an engaging way. Ryan Tedder often explains how, as he's producing, he likes to vary the rhythmic pattern of a song and add new elements from one verse to the next, to avoid repetition and keep the listeners engaged. This feature of his work comes out especially clearly here, where the song doesn't really follow a standard "verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus" pattern. Theme: My analysis of the theme versus the sound blurs together, because the whole thing, from the lyrics to Ryan's voice, reminds me of early aughts country-pop, like Rascal Flatts or maybe Keith Urban. There's something down-home and folksy about the message here, as Ryan delves into a "she narrative," which he doesn't often do. (On a side note, neither Ryan Tedder nor Dan Reynolds have ever used the word "girl" in their songwriting.) For that matter, Room For You has more lyrics packed into it than almost any other track on Artificial Paradise. When AP dropped, some people complained about how brief each song is, most of them barely cracking three minutes or less. As I discussed in "Serotonin" last year, Ryan Tedder seems to have "burned his (lyrical) bridges" to achieve this level of brevity.Significance: Though last summer I wrote enough analysis about Room For You, it appears to have mostly gone in one ear and out the other. I'm glad to be able to revisit such a simple feel-good song. And I guess that's all I have to say about it. Enjoy  Words: 442. |
My next choice for "The Soundtrack of Your Life" is another track off the Imagine Dragons 2024 album Loom. Deal with it  Wake Up is a favorite of mine, complete with a perfectly zany music video which I highly recommend. Fans have identified about a hundred different ID Easter eggs (references to previous works) hidden in the video's scenes. (Nerdy me identifies a scene which taps into The Phantom Tollbooth and the "senses taker"… see if you can spot it!) The song is exaggerated, weird, even freaky; basically, the Dragons at their best… or worst! Sound: Wake Up features wildly ominous synths, computer drums, electronically modified backing vocals, hip-hop delivery with nonsensical scatting ("spin-in-in-in-in!")... In other words, pretty much anything people might detest about ID. Most of this edgy production style can be attributed to the unconventional approach of Swedish producers Mattman and Robin, as I mentioned previously. My reaction on listening to this song for the first time: "WTH?!" Seriously, I didn't think there was any way I could possibly appreciate it. It took several listens before I got past the initial shock and began to enjoy it. By the time the music video dropped about a week later, I was in a position to greet it with delight; indeed, the music video came on a day when I was miserably sick, and watching it helped me feel better. Theme: At first glance, the lyrics are almost preposterous; in my journal last summer, I described Wake Up as "Taylor Swift meets zombie apocalypse." The idea behind the video-game-esque language is one of overwhelming anxiety, as Dan Reynolds has explained. He tells us he was always a people pleaser who worried and fretted about being nice and getting along. On the Amazon Music Songline show, guitarist Wayne Sermon described watching Dan compose these lyrics on the fly in one sitting when presented with the soundtrack. Speaking of which, Dan shared how all the lyrics to Loom were written in the studio, in real time, as the album was being put together. Usually the Dragons bring a pile of demos with them to present to the producers they work with, but this time they started from scratch. Dan utilized a sort of stream of consciousness approach, letting loose with whatever was on his mind that day and trying not to fuss over it too much later. I identify with his writing process, especially in regards to poetry. I dislike fiddling with a poem after I've made it, preferring to free-flow as much as possible and capture the ideas in my head as they appear, even if I haven't set out with a clear concept of what I want to write about. Significance: Wake Up is one of the cornerstones of my collection, a song I'll watch or listen to in whatever high-quality version I can find. I even tried looking for string/orchestral covers, such as Simply Three or Lindsey Stirling, but there aren't any. It's the kind of song I'll bring with me if I have to walk alone in a scary place… (long story behind that!) It even played an occasional role in my WdC escapades. The same day I sat down to analyze Wake Up for the first time, I read and reviewed a newbie who was attempting to create an astonishingly zany novella with complex, compelling characters. It isn't every day you listen to a song with the word "chainsaw" in it and then read a story about a villain with chainsaw arms. I featured it here, with Wake Up embedded as a sort of theme song "Note: Just popping in to share a zany story/song duo..." Unfortunately, the author later closed their account and disappeared without completing the story  Last Christmas, my good friend Adherennium - Maybe Writing?  hosted a Merit Badge giveaway, as he likes to do. That evening after all was said and done, the totally random thought popped into my head of sending him a Rock Star Dragon MB with a quote from Wake Up. I shook my head and said to myself "no, why would I want to do that? It might startle him."The very next morning, Adherennium facetiously announced his intentions of dispensing with comedy and becoming a paranoid grumpy brute who thinks everyone's out to get him, and I'm like "good grief, I read your mind!" Like, "everybody's coming for ya, wake up!" You can see the perfectly appropriate MB I then sent him in my "sent badges" page for December 26th, 2024. He loved it I'll include the music video as well as the AZ Songline performance, where Dan explains the concepts behind the song. Have fun  Words: 797. |
| My next track is a bit different, a single coming from Jelly Roll's 2024 album Beautifully Broken. I've known about overweight, face-tattoed, country-flavored Jelly Roll and his distinctive voice for several years now, mostly taking note of his 2021 song that goes "I'm just a long-haired son of a sinner, searching for new ways I can get gone…" A dreary piece, indeed, but somewhat interesting by sheer honest grubbiness of content. I remember looking him up a couple years ago and being disgusted (admittedly rather amused as well) by his "Whiskey, Weed, and Waffle House" debacle. After that I tossed him aside. In 2024, he turned up in unexpected places, such as random headlines at the Washington Post about his redefinition of "sobriety." I wasn't paying much attention until OneRepublic dropped a surprise remix collaboration: Hurt (featuring Jelly Roll). Hurt had already been released as a single off Artificial Paradise, but the newer one has JR singing Ryan's second verse… which I thought was rather cheap of him. Usually when artists collaborate on a remix of a previously released song, the secondary artist brings their own substitute verse or bridge. Anyway, I'm not discussing Hurt here, with or without Jelly Roll, because I'm kind of meh about it. Instead I'm discussing JR's single Liar, which caught my fancy from the moment I first heard it at a Love's truck stop last fall. Sound Liar is styled in a country gospel manner, with elements of handclaps, vocals, and rise and fall carefully chosen to give you "all the feels." Upon adding it to my personal playlist and giving it a close listen, I could quickly identify and break down the production, partly because of having recently watched Ryan Tedder doing a video with Vogue, discussing the gospel sounds incorporated into 1R's 2013 hit Counting Stars. Theme Jelly Roll's theme here is one I understand quite well: that of wrestling with your inner demons and calling them out on the intrusive thoughts they fill your head with. He approaches it in a substantial way, refusing to succumb to the addictive and destructive behaviors he's dealing with. I appreciate how this song gives me a dualistic battle to "sink my teeth into;" I've heard the other single off this album, I Am Not Ok, and I find it to be quite bland and unoriginal. Liar, on the other hand, is fiercely memorable, similar to Dan Reynolds when he's dueling with himself. Significance As a whole, I still don't particularly care for Jelly Roll, and I think if anything his recent popularity is "watering him down." Judging by the other single I mentioned, his themes of mental health and addiction are being homogenized and commercialized for a general audience. I believe, however, Liar is one song worth remembering. I think it's good someone from the country music genre is crossing over to pop (maybe?) with the real, down-to-earth message that alcohol and other self-destructive behaviors often exaggerated, normalized and joked about in country music are serious issues. Words: 529. |
| I'll be getting into OneRepublic's 2024 album, Artificial Paradise, released in July, starting off with the title track. At one minute and thirty-eight seconds long, Artificial Paradise is more a trailer, a taste of what the album theme will be, than a complete song on its own. 1R throws in tracks like this every so often; they enjoy working with extended instrumental sessions and even tracks which are almost like two songs in one. Sound One of the peculiar things about the AP album is that half of the songs on it were previously released as singles over the course of three or four years. This made it hard for me at first to pin down any one particular stylistic theme or overarching "narrative" which it seemed to convey. During one interview, lead singer, lyricist and primary 1R producer Ryan Tedder described the upcoming album as being influenced by his current obsession with The Mamas and The Papas. The single released at the time, West Coast, seemed to match, featuring backing harmonies and a "California Dreaming" theme. Yet a later single, Mirage, featuring an Arabic artist and used in a video game, seemed far too edgy and hip-hop flavored to possibly be considered under the same umbrella. Once all the songs were released and the Super Deluxe acoustic bonus series came out, I began to realize the grand theme of Artificial Paradise. Really, you can get an idea of it by staring at the two or three different cover art pieces. It's kind of hard to put into words without sounding like I've consumed magic mushrooms…      The album's overall sound, as well as this track specifically, resembles a close encounter with aliens. No, seriously. In a synesthetic sort of way, many of the instrumentals throughout Artificial Paradise illustrate tension and mystery and floating through the starlit skies, dodging UFOs. As I work through other tracks this month, I'll explain further. Theme Artificial Paradise, the album, carries an overarching narrative of surrealist, slightly tongue-in-cheek questioning of reality. Sometimes there's a note of sadness, of maturity and a desire to escape. Yet even while this reality is in doubt, you're encouraged to live it to the fullest, love those close to you, and look for meaning in the simple blessings of what you have. Artificial Paradise, the title track, sets up the initial playful surrealism haunting the album, by asking us if we're all ghosts in the machine, yet assuring us that as long as we're together, it hardly even matters. Significance This song helped me understand the underlying themes of the sprawling AP album and why it combines an unlikely pairing of West Coast retro and postmodernist "space-out." It's a brief and memorable introduction to an album which helped shape my summer last year. Words: 485. |
| My seventh track is a deep cut off of the 2024 Imagine Dragons album Loom. In an attempt to make the writing of these blog posts easier on myself—and y'all!—I'll try to focus around three questions: what does it sound like, what is it about, and what does it mean to me? These will hopefully provide a brief roadmap to summarize my thoughts. Sound In Your Corner is typical of Loom in that it has an unexpected style. Indeed, nearly every track startled me first time around with unique, funky production elements. This is partly because ID brought Swedish producers Mattman and Robin to help them out with it. This pair liked to take an unconventional approach, and it shows. The song begins and ends with a gentle (perhaps looming) string-based synth wave which perfectly captures the cover art. I'm a highly visual listener, and to me the intro and outro paint a sunrise or sunset. Perhaps this is the one song which encapsulates the sound of Loom as an album. Theme Dan's lyrics discuss a fading relationship, presumably with his ex-wife Aja Volkman. He approaches it in what I feel is a mature manner, reminding the one he's speaking to of his fidelity through the years. Last year I compared the direct, interpersonal theme of this song with the deeply self-absorbed, metaphorical moodiness of a track off ID's 2015 album Smoke + Mirrors, recognizing Dan's growth as a person and as a songwriter. I remarked in my journal at the time that the chorus has a Phil Collins simplicity and catchiness to it. It's the kind of chorus which is quite easy to remember and sing along with. One of the elements which puzzled me at first is the deep background voice saying "hold on! Keep your hands up!" I couldn't understand why this was inserted, and my imagination built up all kinds of fanciful scenarios, since the only thing I could think of to associate with "keep your hands up" was being under arrest! I looked into the phrase "in your corner" and discovered it comes from boxing, where you have a coach in your corner to advise you and be on your side. Then I found that "keep your hands up" is a bit of boxing advice, which would presumably be shouted from that very corner during a match. This explains why the phrase would be included in the song. Significance Sitting here this evening writing while listening to In Your Corner, I realize I haven't listened to the studio version since last year when it was released. It brings back memories of where I was last summer, sitting up late, watching the moon outside my window, playing my songs… I can't help reflecting how in a parasocial sort of way Dan Reynolds is speaking to all of us, reminding us how he's been here all along; his music is always "in our corner" waiting for us. The version I've listened to more recently is the VEVO Extended Sessions live video, which I've downloaded to my playlist. It's more muted and acoustic than the studio, and Dan's sincerity of emotion comes through strongly. Words: 540. |
| I couldn't recap last year's playlist without mentioning at least one song from OneRepublic's 2016 album Oh My My. There would be many more, only I've run out of days in the month Let's Hurt Tonight was a lead single off the album and featured in a movie . I'm a sucker for warm acoustic guitar openings, and this has been a treasured favorite of mine since I discovered it. I love Ryan's vulnerability as he pours his heart into the message of open, honest communication as the glue holding a relationship together. In 2024, I chose Oh My My as the album I would write stories to for Jeff's "Musicology Anthology" . This was the biggest writing project I'd taken on yet, requiring me to get eighteen stories completed in two months (it would have been three, but I participated in "Game of Thrones" in April…) For the entire writing process, the only music I listened to was this 1R album, as I was determined to tap the atmosphere and concepts of each song to create the best, most inspired stories possible, without being distracted by other unrelated songs.(Conveniently, both 1R and ID released their 2024 albums almost immediately after this project was completed, so I was able to focus entirely on the new music, almost as a reward for reaching what felt like a nearly insurmountable goal.) Anyway, as I brainstormed ideas of story themes to tie in with each song on the album, I found myself hearkening back to a theme I'd been wanting to write a story on for many years, long before I became a OneRepublic aficionado. It's a mashup of the themes of Lady Windermere's Fan (Oscar Wilde) and The Cricket on the Hearth (Charles Dickens), with a modern, inclusive twist added by the heroine's identity, which is my own. The entire concept is one I feel deeply about and have turned over from many angles in my head. I often ponder the significance of marriage, what it means to be a spouse and the expectations each person brings to the relationship and how these can be reconciled. With an allotment of 2500 words and an appropriate lyrical theme, I decided 1R's Let's Hurt Tonight would provide me the perfect opportunity to finally write the story I'd dreamed of. And I did. My album collection won first place at Jeff's contest, and Let's Hurt Tonight received an award from an appreciative fellow author. I'm proud of myself for getting such an intimate story out there, and I have to thank OneRepublic for giving me the courage to do so within the framework of their beautifully kaleidoscopic album. Without further bragging or advertising, here's the song, with my story down below. Enjoy them both
Words: 477. |
| My fifth track is the lead single from Imagine Dragons 2015 sophomore album Smoke + Mirrors. Full of anguish and a deep sense of loss and confusion, it's a song which has spoken powerfully to me from the moment I discovered it. In October 2017, I was starting out on my journey of musical exploration, and I had not had much experience with Imagine Dragons. Believer, from their third album Evolve, had dropped that summer, taking the world by storm. The unforgettably explosive declaration of strength in pain, unlike anything I'd heard before, grabbed my fancy and wouldn't let go. Yet their 2012 breakout hit Demons frightened me (super long story behind that…) I didn't know if they were decent people, or if they lived up to the old wives tale of rock stars who literally sold their souls to the devil for fame and fortune. One afternoon as I sat in a McDonald's in Greenville South Carolina, I found myself lazily doing Google Sound Searches on every song drifting by overhead. I wasn't paying much attention to any of it, until one: Shots. Seeing it was a song I hadn't heard yet from Imagine Dragons, I immediately looked up the lyrics to analyze it… and came to tears right there in the restaurant: "I'm sorry for everything, oh everything I've done From the second that I was born it seems I had a loaded gun And then I Shot Shot Shot A hole through everything I loved Oh I Shot Shot Shot A hole through every single thing that I loved…" I never knew anyone else felt the way I did. I couldn't believe someone would be brave enough to say it in a song. I knew then, Imagine Dragons was a band worthy of my time. Every word of Shots resonated within me as if I'd written it myself. This was my introduction to ID's Smoke + Mirrors album, and I'll never forget it. I don't know how many times I've cried over Shots since then, sometimes for myself, and sometimes for Dan Reynolds, as I see him reiterating his words with new weight as his life changes. It's a song I try to save for special moments, afraid to allow it to become "just another song" drifting by every so often on a shuffle mix. I have several versions of it on my playlist, including a lullaby instrumental rendition from Rockabye Baby. Being the lead single, ID poured themselves into its music video and made it spectacular. I haven't yet told you the story of Tim Cantor , the surrealist oil painter who ID hired to create cover art for each track on Smoke + Mirrors. They had the idea of bringing each painting to life on the video and sending Dan through them all like Alice in Wonderland. You have to see it.This album and the art associated with it taught me how to embrace, process and accept darker and heavier emotions. I learned to create beauty out of pain, and I did so alongside someone I trust. As a person with almost no real world connections, this means a lot to me. I chose it particularly because last year there were several live versions (including an acoustic with a string orchestra backing, not shown here because I had to extract it myself from an hour long show) and I spent more time with it than I usually do. Words: 560. |
| My fourth choice is a dance track dropped January 24th, 2025. Kygo is an EDM (electronic dance music) producer who often collaborates with my favorite artists, OneRepublic and Imagine Dragons. Even when he doesn't, he's one of the few EDM people I can usually recognize his light, shimmering style in a song's production. Chasing Paradise is a bright and cheerful song, where lead singer and lyricist Ryan Tedder shows off his best skills. He opens on a gruff note, and indeed the whole song runs deeper than he usually does, which reminds me of what I learned recently about his little trick of coughing up a cigar to deepen his voice. (Why do that when you can adjust it electronically? More authentic, I guess.) Something I appreciate about Ryan's songwriting is when he packs more words into a song than would be generally expected. Sometimes, especially recently, he gets lazy with the lyrics, but occasionally 1R comes out with a song with more variety than repetition. This is important when dealing with EDM, as they often do not have as many unique lyrics as an ordinary song and can be repetitive to the point of devaluation. This song dropped at exactly the right moment for me, as I'd been struggling through about ten days of polar vortex, becoming irritable and emotionally drained by the lack of sunlight and constant damp chill in the air. I've lived in Florida since 2019, so I was no longer acclimated to days barely reaching 45°F. Finally that morning the sun broke through the clouds, and Chasing Paradise was there to help cheer me up and remind me of warmer days ahead. I had it on loop all day, dancing to it at home and bringing it with me to combat the noisy environment as I shopped, which I don't usually do. (Ironically, as I removed my earbuds while leaving, I found Walmart was playing an old favorite from OneRepublic: Love Runs Out (2014) )Enjoy this warm and hopeful spot of sunshine on a cloudy day Words: 349. |
| Number three in my "The Soundtrack of Your Life" tracklist is Monica, an old demo which Imagine Dragons released from the vault about a week ago in celebration of the tenth anniversary of their sophomore album Smoke + Mirrors. I'm including it just for fun. When I first listened to this song, I spent most of it trying to figure out why on earth Dan Reynolds fake deepened his voice to such an exaggerated extent. It was almost over when I realized he probably wanted to sound more like George Ezra, an artist who was trending at approximately the time this demo was created. After the initial shock, I found myself laughing at the almost asinine yet deadpan goofiness of the lyrics: "popcorn candy - my favorite." It hearkens back to some of ID's earliest work such as Emma (2009), when Dan was unsure of himself as a songwriter and tended to write corny, mostly fictionalized songs about failed love, rather than being brave enough to really share his heart with us. I can see why Monica never made it to the album, as it largely lacks the moody, medieval mystique which I love so much about S+M, instead dealing with a dud relationship in absurdly whimsical detail. It feels like a song Dan sat down and put together experimentally (indeed almost haphazardly) on his computer… which is exactly what a demo usually is, I suppose. I've actually watched him show us how he composes raw demos, but that's a story for another time. An interesting observation I discovered on Reddit points out the presence of "tritones" in Monica, which I'd never heard of before. Having no knowledge of music theory, I'm not sure if I can identify them myself, but it's certainly something which adds depth to what could be considered a rather disposable song.At any rate, this is a side of the Dragons we've not seen before, and as such it's quaint and amusing. Words: 338. |
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