Hear Me Out — Warmth
I sat down on the grass in a Cosmic Meadow, waiting for my friends at the rendezvous. The Vegas night was around 100+ degrees and it was not cooling down. I had seen all the big acts I had always dreamed of seeing, so I didn’t mind missing out on the last ones, because I knew I would be back to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway next year for EDC 2018 to see them.
I sat there looking at my phone waiting for the “We here,” text until I noticed I had been rocking. I had been swaying back and forth to the beat subconsciously. I wasn’t paying attention at all to the artist on stage but my body was. I looked up at the massive five panel screen stage that was Cosmic Meadow to see the psychedelic images ever so gently flashing across all of them.
I looked up the set times for 4 am on my phone and saw that it was Chet Porter playing. I never heard of him before but I was happy I just did.
I was totally captivated. The past couple nights I had been in total party mode. I had been jumping, dancing, awkwardly shuffling all over the place but his set totally captivated me. When I heard those soothing synths and mellow melodies held with relaxing chopped up vocals, it felt like I was in my most peaceful state ever.
It felt like a hug. It felt like I had been embraced by a long forgotten friend. It felt like a smothering bear hug given by my parents when I came back home. It was the warm feeling that got to me. A type of warmth that cannot be replicated no matter how many blankets I covered myself with. A type of warmth that can express love without words.
On the long car ride home, I looked up Porter’s Spotify page and pressed shuffle play. I was rocking back and forth in the car, just as I had been at Cosmic but when Stay started playing, I had instant goosebumps. I started to tear up. The warm feeling was back, and it was intoxicating.
Listening to the song for the entire car ride reminded me of things I took for granted. It reminded me how intimate a hug is. It reminded me of how someone can give you warmth, that they can hold you tight and reassure you, “everything is alright.” How they can melt all the mind numbing problems you have within your head.
It’s the reason why we fight long and difficult fights to keep them in our lives. It’s why we go to the ends of the earth to find them again. It’s why we would die for them.
Stay was designed not to replicate that warmth, but to help you remember it.
It wants you to remember the happy times you had huddled close to your family at Christmas. It wants you to cherish the cuddles you had with your significant other on the couch as you both dozed off. It wants us to remember how we said goodbye to our friends when they left for college, knowing we won’t see them for months or even years, and the last hug we gave them.
But just as we experience warmth, we must also experience its counterpart: Emptiness.
If you lose the long and difficult fight to keep your loved one, and you remember the memories you had together…you just…feel…empty.
You can be angry all you want and cry in bed until your tears run out, but at the end of day, you lost them. You lost the warmth that they carried. It’s just empty. You have to accept what happened and try to move on. We replay the memories in our head over and over again, wondering if we could have done something more or fixed what we did wrong to keep them.
Once we are exposed to that unique warmth, it’s very difficult to forget.
So if Chet Porter wants you to Stay and feel the warmth, Said the Sky wants you to reminisce the ones that left in All I Got.
The element of the song I really want to focus on is Kwesi’s voice. He is able to convey the pain, sorrow, and regret of all the mistakes he made and the choices he didn’t make as he reminisces about his previous relationship. But its not just that, Trevor (Said the Sky) takes it and he transforms it into something so beautiful, I was dumbfounded when I first heard it.
He transcends Kwesi’s voice into a heavenly-like state. It is still pained, and full of regret but there is a sense of maturity in it now, as if he has come to terms that she will never come back. However, it retains a human aspect to it as if to prove to the listener that anyone can transcend like Kwesi. Trevor elegantly incorporates all of this into the bass line to add an extra punch to it.
That sound, that vocal chop by itself was able to invoke my peaceful state at EDC. It is one of the most warming sounds I have heard. Yet, with the context of the song, it is also one of the most painful I have heard, because while it reminded me of my peaceful state and that warmth, it also told me that I will never experience anything like it ever again.
I was amazed that we have come so far in production that a sound like that exists. It exists with so much weight and so much force, it shouldn’t be possible.
When you get to the time stamp 3:35, trust me when I say this: you will hurt. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you have done; you will hurt.
Both of these songs are able to capture what it means to be human. What it means to love and to give warmth but to also lose it and be empty. In this game of life, we must experience one to understand the other. To truly feel genuine happiness, we had to be empty in the beginning and if we are constantly filled with familiar warmth, we will not know the different kinds this life has to offer.
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I’m Darenz Durana and I’m on a pretentious quest of finding songs that aren’t just meant to be heard, but to be listened. I want to discover the most of what talented producers can produce, and what singers, rappers, and MC’s have to offer. I want to research barriers that were broken and see how close we are on breaking new ones. I want to find sounds that are tried and tested but also find new contemporary ones that will set the standard.
I want you to join me to on this journey. I want you to Hear Me Out.
