MUSIC | TAME IMPALA

Tame Impala’s “Lost in Yesterday”: The Pangs of a Bittersweet Nostalgia

An emotional standout from the “Slow Rush” album

Ben Ulansey
The Music That Moves Us
5 min readDec 22, 2023

--

Artwork for Lost in Yesterday
Tame Impala / Wavehouse Studios

Sometimes with songs, it’s the feeling that matters more than the lyrics. Vocal-free songs often provide the widest space for the mind to wander. But in songs with lyrics, there’s the added benefit of having a defined sort of poetry written on the page. And while sometimes those lines have a manufactured meaning, other times they’re as free-floating and interpretationless as a symphony orchestra.

But other times, in those songs with lyrics, the mind is given an interesting opportunity to fill in the blanks that singers leave in their less enunciated words. In some cases, the meaning we imagine in the absence of comprehension is something more poignant; we’re underwhelmed once we actually get as far as looking up the lyrics. “Lost in Yesterday” by Tame Impala is one of those songs.

The lyrics:

“Now even though that was a time I hated…

--

--

Ben Ulansey
The Music That Moves Us

Writer, musician, dog whisperer, video game enthusiast and amateur lucid dreamer. I write memoirs, satires, philosophical treatises and everything in between 🐙