Day 69 - Music and Temperature

27 Apr 2017 100daysofwriting · music · temperature · thought-peices

This is one of the posts that I hope to be proud of when I am done with this 100 days of writing marathon.

For a long time, moods and music have been closely connected. I think temperatures are too. Stay with me.

On a hot summer day (hot is about 35-40 degrees celsius, here in India), listening to an Arctic Monkeys song that is racing through is hard. I might listen to it for a bit, but I eventually end up feeling hot. Especially, songs from Favourite Worst Nightmare. The best example is If You Were There, Beware.

The songs starts out slightly less heavier than it gets, which makes it a bit more enticing.

Whereas, now compare it to the following two songs. They instantly make you feel light and cold.

All Lana Del Rey songs seem to induce a laid-back, let’s sleep this one out attitude on the listener. I first binged on Summertime Sadness for a whole month in the Summer of 2014. I hadn’t heard any of her other songs then, but that one song that I heard and it’s video was enough to put me through May 2014, in temperatures that were way over 40 degrees in Kharagpur. Listening to it now, I feel like that song was incredibly “hot” and there was definitely something off with me for having heard it and liked it in the summer.

Bonus fact: I had no clue what Summertime Sadness was, when I first heard the song. I liked the lyrics though, they were poetic and each sentence merged into the other. That is a feeling I have about Lana’s music even today. (She released a single a few days back.) Now that I know what it means, the video makes a lot more sense. It builds up to the climax that I didn’t understand before.

There are some songs I couldn’t quite figure out, though.

It’s probably because these songs don’t really have any unique “temperature” to them. They are cold-blooded, they adapt to the temperature their listener is in. That’s a pretty cool analogy, I feel. But, who am I, really?

P.S. (to a post that I was hoping would be great but turned out to be slightly above average): I have been meaning to do a chronological music catalogue in which I list what all artists, bands and people making music I love. Something that I could look back on 10 years from now and reflect at how mature / immature / misled I was, at this point in my life.

I would give anything to have a Year In Review video for every single year of my life. Something that is incredibly fast paced and basically a clone of this Casey Neistat video.