All I Need
Last night I was up late mostly writing a blog about uncertainty and life and writing.
https://vontonks.github.io/blog/2022/05/16/still-uncertain.html
Which has meant I’m a bit sleepy by this afternoon. But I’ve been listening today to a song I adore, Etherwood’s remix of ‘Better Half of Me’ by Tom Walker.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv6vS4R5MYw
I have a tendency to get obsessed obsessed by songs. Something will catch my ear and that’ll be all I listen to for a few days until the shine wears off. Since working from home became a thing in 2020 I’ve been leaning hard on drum and bass to keep me focused and I guess I stumbled on this song during a random playlist run through. I hit like as I do with songs that catch my ear and didn’t think much of it. For whatever reason today it struck me. After searching for words all last night and starting a new hunt for vows, the lyrics really spoke to me. Our circumstances aren’t the same as the love in in this song but the feeling is the same, that wherever she is is my home.
“I’d have all I need
“If you were standing right in front of me
“I’ll finally see
“What it means to be complete
“Don’t need to spend our lives chasing gold
“Anywhere with you, I’ll call my home
“I’d have all I need
“If you’d be the better half of me”
See, it’s nice, isn’t it?
So after having that remix on repeat all day I’ve gone and listened to the original.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU-rQ-nvcKE
Honestly, I don’t like it as much. The constant backing beat in Etherwood’s remix empowers Walker’s voice while the keys build a fairly sparse structure, rising and falling with the drums to let the vocals shine in a way the fairly generic acoustic guitar and piano don’t in the original.
Music is awesome.
Scrolling through my Spotify liked songs – such a good little feature, even if it is all part of profiling you based on your music tastes for reasons – I found this other little gem I’ve previously played on repeat, ‘Only Everyone Can Judge Me’ by Crywank.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_O3z4VoJVU
Very much on the other end of the scale, thematically, to the Tom Walker song. More despair than love.
Musically it’s simple enough for the first verse: repeated bars finger picking a set of chords while sticks are apathetically dropped on a light kit.
Lyrically we have frustrations about internet culture, “hive mind is scary I feel vulnerable and stupid”, the speaker is unable to perform in the face of a constant barrage of success, beauty, strength, wealth, and intelligence on social media.
“This confidence I fake only makes matters worse
“I am not a stallion, I am just perverse
“Hopeless and docile and tamed”
It’s kind of incel-y in its subject matter but without putting blame on Chads and Staceys, instead the speaker is honestly expressing a kind of normie impotence; a domesticated servant, not a conquering adventurer, who dwells on and, is paralysed by, the minutiae of social interaction.
“Did I forget your name or make a joke and no one laughed?
“Did I come across as stupid or did I cum too fast?”
Then there’s the treatment of time leading up to an emotional shift in the vocals from a confessional diarising tone to genuine feeling of regret. It’s the delivery of the line “every day feels the same” that gets me. As if all the other problems, the comparative inter-personal inadequacy issues, are compounded by a chronic awareness that nothing will ever change – he’s trapped.
From the emotional release in “every day feels the same” the song rolls down toward its honest conclusion, dispensing with general statements in favour of those specific examples of social faux before before admitting “This isn’t a brave face / This is a mask”.
Here it drops into like a little acoustic breakdown. The whole structure of this song and so much of Crywank is just awesome.
Yes, it’s sad, but almost in a modern heroic way. The superstructures of the world are despairing and shit and we’re small; finding for pleasure in self-gratification, searching for love, hoping for change, filled with self-loathing but with no honest way out. Every day feels the same. The hive mind is scary. Tedious days punctuated by dismay. This is a mask.
Current Projects
‘Kaylene’ a short story about a digital artist: 0 words today (2,280 total)
Now-unnamed novel: planning, character development; getting there.
2022 fiction word count: 14,059