a rainy night in town

A few photos that I took tonight.

la lengua

Currently Listening: Yael Naim - Levater

There’s something captivating about listening to music in a foreign language. It’s a beautiful paradox - you can’t understand a single word, but magically, you still understand everything. Lost in translation? There’s no such thing. You know exactly how the artist felt when the song was written - you know what it means. You can feel every last feather’s weight of emotion buried beneath the notes, it’s not hard to dig up. You can sense the direction of the melody: the climb of an uphill scale, the freedom of arpeggios, the circular waves of rotating chords. It’s just like feeling the wind - you don’t have to open your eyes to know which way the air is blowing; where it’s colliding with your face, nipping your ears, fluttering your hair is already evidence, enough. The subtle touches of every moment of the music do the translation, by themselves. It’s like slowly (but freely) connecting dots between the stars at night, forming your own masterpiece of imagination.

So, no - I have no clue as to what “Levater” translates to in English. But frankly, I don’t want to know. Leaving it a mystery, out of my grasp in a sense, makes it that much more fulfilling to the ear. I’m free to run away with it’s mood, to drown myself in its remarkably powerful chorus, to adjust my interpretation of the music to good mornings, good nights, and good byes.

for better or for worse

.. I’d still have you first.

There’s some things you can never forgive yourself for, never stop regretting, never stop remembering.

The world feels pretty empty. My mind feels empty, my soul feels empty. My hope feels empty. You could see it as a good thing - light as a feather, no maybes, no worries, no expectation. Or you could see it as a bad thing - empty to the point of blankness, of forgetting what makes you smile and losing what you once thought you couldn’t live without. Empty to the point of disposable, useless .. and yet, you could care less.

I don’t know where I’m headed anymore, and these few weeks have taken a bulldozer to my original plans and hopes for the future. Why wake up in the morning when all you do is confront another day full of passing - passing faces, passing classes, passing time, passing yourself on by without even realizing it, yet going through the motions regardless. I look in the mirror and wonder who that girl is. Bags beneath her eyes from lack of sleep and worry wrinkles that can’t be erased by a million Alpha-Hydroxy treatments. She doesn’t even try to look pretty anymore - there’s nobody to impress, not even herself. In the end, she still comes home every day to her bed and takes a nap to forget about the stillness of life, how trapped she feels amongst these cyclic, crashing tidal waves of boredom.

I have yet to find what fuels me, what makes life more than an apathetic masquerade. I have yet to find what makes me more than just another child, clutching onto cotton candy for dear life, on a hollow merry-go-round.

fool's gold

There aren’t many things I look forward to nowadays. And there are fewer things I look forward to that actually prove to be worth the wait - they’re usually not nearly as great as I anticipated. Like fool’s gold, they sparkle from far away, drawing you near in metallic whispers. And once you get down to the core, they’re just as worthless and unsatisfying as the last fake rhinestone.

But there’s one thing I know for sure that, when it happens, will be so much better than I can hope or imagine. It’s going to be better than even all the fancies and daydreams of the wait, all the time spent envisioning its happening. It’s going to be so worthwhile, so surreal, and so unforgettable. There’s no way it could go wrong - I just hope it happens sooner or later.

That’s my driving force.

fine lines

Tread the line as it treads itself
an unraveling fit for kings and queens
ceremonies laden with love and coated in gold
beneath the realm of backwards progress
He says between sips of a tin beer can
Did you know God is everywhere?
Did you know He’s in my drink? In the stink of my breath?
Between the dirty seats of this train
and the ugliest smog of night?
In the lost fog of insanity
and the clean air of clarity?
I saw Him once then never again
A glaring light, the kind to blind you
the kind to strip and cleanse you
of the stink of your breath
and the dirty seats of this train
and the ugliest smog of night

I said to him I never saw
such glaring light, the kind to blind
Where could I find it? I asked him gently
Between the edge of night and day?
Tell me the splendor inside of the secret
On the corner of left
and the crosswalks of right?
Scribbling the lines of heaven and hell
the ones that tell you where to go?
He said to me, you cannot find it
but for the sole reason
that you do not try

wakeful

The new OneRepublic album is phenomenal. They keep 100% of their talent without losing the signature style that makes them so unique, to begin with. If anything, they’ve refined and perfected their style - sanded off a few bumpy edges. Primed, polished, and toned the balance of instrumental vs. electronic elements. They’ve synthesized features of classical, hip-hop, ambient, and rock genres into one stunningly colorful masterpiece. And this album, even more so than the first album, is not only metaphorical social commentary on the brokenness of the world, but also on the hope buried deep in humanity’s drive to change and revolutionize itself. Listening to it makes me feel the potential leadership charisma inside of music.

"OneRepublic adds many production flourishes to their second album Waking Up: sawing strings, children's choirs, minor-key piano, cavernous U2 reverb, long ponderous instrumental sections of piano and orchestra duets, a title track that bears echoes of the Killers. Despite all these new additions, OneRepublic's calling card remains Ryan Tedder's blend of atmospheric modern rock and rhythmic modern R&B affectations, creating a coolly slick collection of power ballads of love lost and won."

Bravo for music that is pivotal in both message and sound.