#garbiji

“Atlas Hands” by Benjamin Francis Leftwich is one of those songs that match your mood for you. When I listen to it in a happier time, it’s a calming song that reminds of me a misty breeze at an ocean cliffside, or 4 o’clock sunlight streaming in through a south-facing window as you write in a journal. When I’m feeling down, it’s a wistful song, something that helps soothe peaks of emotion until it’s more of a current, and you can drift along  ariver until you’re at peace again. I love it.

“Getting High on Humans” by Oh Wonder is a song that I enjoy, not for its music, but what it represents. I understand that feeling of ‘getting high on humans’. I’ve traveled quite a bit for my age, not to resorts or overseas, but just long bus rides, tiring flights. When I listen to this song, I know the writers intended it to represent that little rush you can get when you talk to a stranger, and this song’s existence helps me to remember everyone I’ve met - the homeless young woman whom I gave a homemade hamburger, the deaf couple that let me practice ASL with them en route from Toronto to Philadelphia, the girl who smuggled a pitbull puppy from Philadelphia to Boston.

“Personal” by Stars is the first song that made me realize that music was its own medium of storytelling, with its own techniques. I mean, I’ve always been a showtune fan, so I knew that music could be part of a story, but this is a slow, melancholy song that tells a full story in how sparse it is. The lyrics are simple, showing a correspondence between a man and a woman on an online dating site. What gives the story depth and layer, however, is the rhythm, the pacing of the lyrics, the repetition, and everything left unsaid. It’s a song brimming with a full story, and it’s lovely in how it manages not to overflow.

“LOVE” by PSY released its music video two weeks ago, and I really like it. It’s a feelgood song, and what I particularly like is that it’s PSY trying to break away from the success of “Gangnam Style”. It doesn’t follow the same formula, and something about PSY’s songs that I love is that the English translations aren’t literal. The Korean lyrics are clever and fun, and whoever the translator is, they find equivalent idioms and retain that feeling even in the English, and it fits to the beat too, last time I checked. A peaceful, bouncy, hopeful song.