Week 4: Soul Gongs
You know that sensation when a song or group of lyrics strum across your most vulnerable chords unsuspectingly? I had one of those moments today where my heartstrings were tied to my sleeves trying to heal. Of course it was on the rainiest, greyest day of the week.
I didn’t realize my sore spots were craving bandaided closure until a car ride home from the grocery store. In this state, there are songs that make my heart physically ache as the car bass vibrates the bones of my rib cage. My tear ducts, pain receptors and empath radar are on higher alerts than usual.
These are the three tunes that slipped through the semi-open wounds and diffused directly into my cardiac bloodstream that just reverberated like a gong to the soul.
Paper Crown by Alec Benjamin
This song is like someone is grabbing my shoulders from behind and rocking them. Fast enough for me to notice that someone is behind me, but steady enough to slowly calm me down. It’s a comforting yet dramatic, grounding presence. It’s also bittersweet, like expecting to bite into smooth chocolate chips only to be greeted with healthier (allegedly) clumps of raisins in your cookie.
This narrative song dives deeper into the queen character coming to terms that she’s going to be the only one carrying herself out of this pile of damage from the perspective of the narrator. Maybe because she built her walls too high, that’s why things crumbled down the way they did. Or maybe because she built her walls too high, that’s why no one’s coming to help her sweep up the debris.
The lyrics that pulled the heartstrings out of my chest are: But when you're all alone / You wait and you hide / 'Cause it's the story of a queen whose castle has fallen to the sea / Knowing there's no one who will be a king that will come and save his queen. What more can you say about feeling lonely and scared? You stall and avoid confronting your own pain because you don’t want to face it yourself. And when you don’t have a person to confide in, you really are aware of how much rebuilding you have to initiate yourself. It’s an exhausting reality.
It’s comforting to hear someone write song about the feeling you’ve felt alienated by. I feel seen because someone has written a beautifully tragic song about this very daunting, engulfing, isolating whirlpool of feelings I’m sitting at the center of. This song is a piece of art that so poetically verbalizes the smorgasbord of lonely sad-gal feels that’s really difficult to put words to. And to feel seen is one of life’s most reassuring and irreplaceable sensations in my humble opinion.
Wavin’ Flag by K’naan ft. will.i.am & David Guetta
World Cup season is one of my favorite times of the year. I felt the tears welling up when I heard this song again for the first time in forever. This remixed headlining track from the 2010 games is truly timeless. It’s for the fighters and ones filled to the brim with hope for the future. As far as World Cup songs go, this one is in the top 2 for me. The threads of unity and universal longings for a better, safer and more inclusive world are so prominent. This song really accentuates the belief that anyone can be a changemaker.
It’s empowering because it’s filled with affirmations and manifestations sprinkled throughout. In addition to the waves of pure nostalgia, this song is just overflowing with optimism for tomorrow. All versions of K’naan’s song are bops but this remix with will.i.am and David Guetta is the one I gravitate towards the most because of the beats and lyrics like this: And we wondering when we'll be free / So we patiently wait (Wait) for that faithful day (Go) / It's not far away, but for now we say. It’s the perfect oxymoron of contrasting lyrics in the best way leading into the hook. K’naan and will.i.am riff back and forth before establishing that today is a reasonable candidate of a day to start working towards change.
It reminds me of a moment from highschool. My math teacher was trying to encourage us on a pep talk and said something along the lines of “You can change the world” to which the girl across the room replied with “For the better”. I will never forget how she made it a point to clarify that although we all have the ability to change history, let’s hope it’s for the better.
Nothing New (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault) by Taylor Swift
I will admit, I was reminded of this song from its resurfacing on Instagram Reels. Nonetheless, as a young person who is closer now to 22 than 18, this lyric was like an unsuspecting uppercut at my sense of time: How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22?. In my twenties, I feel like there’s this pressure to live a little less for me and start living for a “stable” future, whatever that may look like. 18 encouraged the carefree, spontaneous, adventurous never-ending horizons. 22 doesn’t end that persay, it just allows the possibility of the balances shifting.
When I was an 18 year old into my first semester at college, man, I really saw the world as my oyster. Maybe because I was so happy to be out of high school, I would frolic around campus in pure, unadulterated awe praying that this wasn’t a fieldtrip I would be ripped away from. At 18, I dreamt about my first time voting and pledged to myself that I would fill out every ballot I qualified for. At 18, I was smiling at everyone I talked to in my classes because the meet-cute for my forever love story had to be on this campus. I pictured myself walking out of my hardest circuits class, being greeted by a bunch of freshly yanked dandelions that crowded the STEM building and a smiling face with those dreamy eyes could melt me from the inside-out. At 18, I was going to ace my STEM classes while simultaneously being vice president for the literary magazine and publishing pages of my own poetry. At 18, I convinced myself I was going to move my whole family across the country somewhere warmer one day funded by my creative writing pursuits. Life felt more like a cloudless, sunny, fresh start back then.
Taylor’s artistic brain and ability to verbalize the feelings I can never fully grasp is magical. What I would give to just sit in the same room as her during a creative session (is this called manifesting?).
Growing up is wild dude. <3
