Rants & Raves
Owl City’s Everlasting Nostalgia
Adam Young’s Powerful, Lyrical Brilliance in Being a Raconteur
Everyone has that one artist or band who reaches them to their core. Whether it be for the musicality, the art, the artist, or a combination of all of those elements, for me, that one artist (among a few others) has been Owl City. And the one thing that Owl City fans feed off of is nostalgia.
In today’s oversaturated music industry of unnatural sounds, Adam Young, the sole artist of the one-man band that is Owl City, couples his pure, innocent voice with a variety of sonic accoutrements — creating a combination that results in most of his music becoming a type of niche electronica pop. But unlike most pop music in today’s climate, Adam Young’s ability to tell a story is unrivaled. He remains to be one of the few, perhaps the only artist, whose lyrical lexicon is like singing a New Yorker magazine article to you — peppered with vocabulary unheard of in any music — only in a more poetic, beautiful way that hits your heartstrings and your soul.
Owl City’s best-known song is “Fireflies,” which has garnered over 500 million views on YouTube in its fourteen years of being published. It became a TikTok hit in recent times, being remixed and reused quite a bit. Perhaps because of the song’s…
