we finally got the song of the summer. it just took all summer
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The chorus never really resolves and that certainly gives it a feeling that actually even though love is everywhere itās also just out of reach. It also doesnāt have a conclusion, it just fades out. Itās very eerie!
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the song is cool as fuck
aside, not picking, but i truly, truly, truly hate the term āadult contemporaryā
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i guess i find this to be an exceptionally well written song, the things you are picking out about it are the things that make it magical. adult contemporary is a scam term meant to trick people that some music isnāt cool when only the music itself can tell you that. this music is telling me a lot
edit to avoid triple posting: this song is incredible, now one of my favorites, thank you for sharing
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David Lynch style song
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Yeah, I guess I was using it to try and gesture at a whole category of likeā¦ pretty forgettable pop music produced over a certain time period, but I agree it is a bit of a nothing term in the same way people tend to throw around āslopā these daysā¦
I guess what I was getting at is that the song is fairly unassuming, you might hear it play in the background somewhere and not give it much notice until later when you find yourself repeating the lyrics to yourself and think āwait, what the hell?ā
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itās funny, iām thinking of it the other way
the bad music you hear in the background sometimes is like a refraction of a refraction of a crude drawing from memory of songs like this. because they are incapable of doing anything on this level, and because they dominate a sorta-kinda sound cluster at least in some cultural perceptions, the expectation is that something in this sound cluster cannot be good, so if it is good, it is almost exceeding its stature
so, i guess i am just thinking about tracing that back to where it came from
for every extremely bad piece of music, there is a good piece of music, emulated, butchered, processed. profit optional but interestingly correlated
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really long winded response, hidden so as to not clutter up the thread
Yeah, this is a really interesting thing to try and pull apartā¦ part of what jars about the style of music for me isnāt that itās ābadā necessarily, or sounds similar to other music I would consider ābadā, but that it just feels a bit anachronistic for 1980 which I think is what led me to using āadult contemporaryā. From what I thought I understood about that phrase it was mostly used to refer to radio stations that catered towards an older generation? So maybe not the younger bands coming out right there and then, making music about the here and now, but a slightly older, nostalgic crowd likeā¦ their parents? And so I guess when I initially heard the song for the first time, there was this slight impression of like āthis feels a bit old hatā and you know I see the title and my head sorta goes to a place of these must be the hippies who grew up, settled down, maybe lost touch somewhat but are still singing about this indestructible love like the 60s never ended. It seemed a bit delusional I guess, but I think what ultimately changes it is that there is a genuine pathos that seems to build as it goes on, a very tangible sense of heartbreak and that felt strangely vulnerable/revealing, like some sort of admission/confession, or at the very least itās likeā¦ perhaps the intentions of it being a simple nostalgic song about love, that other stuff couldnāt help but creep inā¦ and yāknow that could all still be bullshit of course, I dunno what happened behind the scenes, Sally and I arenāt pals like that, but it certainly leads to a really interesting listening experience and thinking about all those possibilities of what exists between the lines, the stuff that the melody and progression seem to suggest, or the slightly foreboding lyrical touches here and there, or the strained vocalsā¦ Itās a fascinating artifact. There are more songs on that same album that also play into that feeling but this post is already super long, so Iāll let you check em out for yourself 
glad you like the song as much as me!
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breezy
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When going through end of the year best lists a few years back I got directed to one odd song by HMLTD that got stuck in my head, now they have new stuff coming out and another (much less odd) song of theirs has gotten stuck in my head once again.
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New cities by the sea
Skyscrapers are winking
Some hills are never seen
The universe expanding
Weāre gazing out to sea
Blue dolphins are singing
Minds swim in ecstasy
Clear planet, ever free
TOOOOOOPPAAAAAAZZZ
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this reminds me a lot of the stuff thatās on Kate Bushās first two albums, which makes sense because itās contemporary to her early material. some of why it sounds unsettling is also that this kind of sound isnāt very common anymore - thereās a bit of uncanniness to listening to it outside of its original context. the sound palette is very clean but not super dynamic - not the more punchy cheesy digital 80ās style production or the reverbed out cheese of early 90ās schmaltz. the vocal performance is mostly in a higher register with a kind of intense vibrato on it in a way that doesnāt really resolve that might have been more natural for that style at the time, but sounds strange now. and part of it is the way a lot of these kinds of songs were written in the 70ās (a songwriting style iām not always a fan of tbh, but i think works well here). i think in general thereās also an implict, unstated uncanniness to some 70ās culture in general that groups like Boards of Canada more explicitly tap into. also this kind of stuff is what drove the fandom around groups like The Carpenters that were seen kind of as cheese in their time but seem a bit stranger and darker in hindsight.
this is a similar sort of Kate Bush song? tho even on her first album, her take on this kind of music was more self-consciously arty and weird
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Yeah, shares a lot in common for sure. Whatever blog it was Iād stumbled across sharing the album this was from way back when pretty much described it as being along the lines of āwe have Kate Bush at homeā¦ā, you can especially hear the similarities in the opener where the vibrato gets cranked up to eleven and the vocal melody jumps up and down in kind of an erratic way not miles from something like Wuthering Heights, also both English with Irish roots, dunno if that might also factor in somehow? or maybe some executive somewhere made the suggestion to get in on the Kate Bush boom due to the passing similaritiesā¦ Havenāt properly explored Sally Oldfieldās earlier albums (or her work with her brother Mike, Mr. Tubular Bells himself!) to see if those similarities were always there or notā¦
That opener I linked to also has a bit of a sinister tone building in it for a song that initially seems to be going for that peace and love hippyish adoption of eastern spirituality thing, isnāt it wonderful to feel the connection to all living things but uh oh, wait actually this is maybe kinda terrifying and overwhelming (help!)ā¦ Yeah, I did wonder alright if itās just easy from the perspective of now to project those sorts of feelings onto this style of musicā¦ Could it have also felt anywhere near as odd then I wonder? There is the odd time Iāll hear a contemporary pop song from the charts while picking up some groceries that also shares a similar uncanniness where I find myself asking something like āis this person okay??ā so maybe thereās a chance someone in 1980 was thinking something similar about Sallyā¦ hmmā¦
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Iām surprised there arenāt more songs about internet crushes. Also one of those songs where I like everything but the refrain.
yeah the English/Irish roots i think is part of it. thereās a bit of deliberate camp to it as well which feels like it was more common on the charts then (see: ABBA or whatever). i also see some similarity to the way Annie Lennox sung here. good song also
Wuthering Heights was a #1 hit in the UK and Kate Bush was definitely a big deal immediately after, so this would not be very surprising if this was the case. itās also a big deal for women in music in general - Kate Bush was the first female artist to have a #1 with a song that she wrote (at least in the UK? dunno about the US)
i think some of this is just the performance being very theatrical and involving the singer playing other characters. like deliberately going for drama. in mainstream pop in the US at least it feels like we basically get one kind of drama, the Kate Bush songs where she sings from the perspective of someone who is having a psychotic break and who youāre definitely not supposed to identify with is not something weāre good at dealing with lol.
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