Mixtapemotions

  • "Satan, Bite the Dust" by Carman, February 18, 2017

    Let me be clear this song is awful. It feels a little Westboro Baptist of me to speak ill of the dead. Last night (Korea time), I read that CCM artist Carmelo Dominic  Licciardello, better known by his first name Carman (like Madonna or Cher), died of complications of hernia surgery. I wasn’t convinced to post a song as tribute. He was a singer that was all kinds of problematic. A kind of Adam Sandler opera man singing at the marriage of the evangelical church and politics. He was CCM’s greatest showman and gayest homophobe. He appropriated gay culture and left “the homosexual in San Fransisco… trapped in vile bondage.” But it’s not Carman’s death that inspires today’s song. It’s another death, the other husband of the evangelical church is politics. Today, conservative talk radio host, Rush Limbaugh also died. I’m not actually influenced directly by either of these men, but they are both carry a torch that has influenced my upbringing and a lot of wrong thinking that takes years to undo. I’m not trying to write from a place of bitterness, but I do think it’s important to analyze (Judgement Day?) the problematic and move forward.

    HE’S TERRORIZED THE LIVES OF MEN, AND NOW HE’S UNDER ARREST. By the time I started listing to CCM radio around the year 1999, Carman was an occasional novelty, kind of like a Weird Al Yakovic to a Top 40 station. I remember songs like “The Witches Invitation,” “R.I.O.T.” and “No Monsters.” His videos were occasionally played on Christian television programs, but they were a little before my time. If memory serves me right, CCM in the ’90s was a cool, handsome Michael W. Smith. Amy Grant, the fallen woman who was almost banned, but still kinda a heart throb. Intro to dad music: Steven Curtis Chapman. DC Talk–a rap group who changed their style with every album. And then there was Carman. Single, sexy, Michael Landon-level of self obsession, Carman. Not gay but just couldn’t find the right girl, Carman. Thanks to The Good Christian Fun podcast, my CCM memories were resurrected and because of their extensive coverage of Carman, including their two-year Halloween tradition, Carmania, Carman was brought back into my consciousness and forever burned in my memory. 

    YOU SPIRIT OF INFIRMITY, YOU AIN’T WELCOME HERE NO MORE.”PRESIDENT TRUMP BLUES” is one of the last songs released by Carman.  Gone were the days of stadium tours, expensive record deals, platinum records, and back up dancer sex offenders. After a miraculous healing from cancer in 2014, Carman began the last stages of his life, including getting married for the first time at the age of 61. The purity ring must have been tight. All jokes aside, I feel something in the pit of my stomach as we watched Carman age into who he became. Mainstream Christianity today is at a crossroads. More and more people are seeing the cracks in the myth of the Christian nation. The “cool” music of ’90s was the Newsboys and Audio Adrenaline screaming the same messages of the preachers who were banning them for playing the devil’s music. But Christian music changes both in style and message. In 2016, Christian Hardcore band The Devil Wears Prada’s lead singer Mike Hranica shouted on tour “Fuck Trump” at all of the band’s shows and the band continues to be played on Christian radio. But when Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay took to Twitter to affirm same-sex marriage, the band never really recovered from that.  I guess what I’m feeling is dissatisfaction, not just with Carman, but with this form of Christianity that fails to admit its wrong doings in the past. And I fear for myself. How can someone’s beliefs and thoughts not grow since the ’90s. How can you just keep spewing out the same type of lyrics that were funny back then, but now we realize they’re quite offensive. It’s time to tell the Satan of the past to bite the dust. 

    https://genius.com/Carman-satan-bite-the-dust-lyrics

  • "Control Freak" by Copeland, Wednesday, February 17, 2021

    I have to be in a certain mood to listen to tracks from Copeland‘s Eat, Sleep, Repeat. Today is the day. Artistically, Copeland’s third record serves as a bridge between their rock/emo days and the band’s future experimental days. Singer/lyricist Aaron Marsh tests out abstract lyricism on this record. While their latest album Blushing deals with some difficult subject matter, ESR is arguably Copeland’s darkest record. This album was their only record on a major label, and “Control Freak” was the lead single. After this record, the band released a B-Side record and stopped touring for a while, and I feared we had seen the last of Copeland. Fortunately, the band returned in 2008 with the ear-candy record You Are My Sunshine, which I talked about last month. Copeland is a band that could have easily made it to the “love song” section of the month, as Marsh knows how to write an interesting love song. But as the song that I chose yesterday reminds us, the cold of winter can’t all be candy hearts and boxes of chocolate. There are still bad days in February. And there are times when you’re left “staring at the ceiling through the night.”

    DO YOU LOSE CONTROL WHEN YOU HOLD TO TIGHT? I didn’t sleep well last night, as I don’t sleep very well before important days. In December my supervisor asked my department to turn in our vacation plan, the days we were taking off. It was approved, but at the end of last week in February, my supervisor said that all teachers had to come in this week to prepare for school. It turns out my supervisor had given us the wrong dates. After some heated discussions, my department decided to come in just for today to renegotiate our contracts for the upcoming year. In Korea, school years start in March and many company employment terms begin in March as well due to college graduations happening in February. When we came in contracts weren’t ready and no meetings were scheduled to sign. “What about tomorrow or Friday” was tossed around, but we were adamant on keeping the rest of our vacation in tact. We walked out with a signed contract just before lunch.

    I’M IN LOVE WITH MY DOUBT. This is one of the downsides of working in Korea. There’s a lot of top-down bullying. Schedules change or supervisors forget to tell you something until the last minute and you’re expected to play along. I’ve found it’s important to find a balance between taking one for the team and protecting your free time. I came to Korea with an open mind, but working with other native English speaker teachers and managing them has made me more of a union leader. It’s a constant battle for control and “it’s freaking me out.”

    Check out the two official videos:

  • "Make Me No King " by Bones Owens, Tuesday, February 16,2021

    In 2008 a gothic emo band appeared on Tooth & Nail Records called The Becoming. Their album produced a few singles and halfway through their short album cycle the DJ on RadioU informed the listeners that the band was now called “We Are the Becoming” for legal reasons. Later the band’s video “I Cry”premiered on TVU. My sister said, “These guys look ridiculous.” Pretty much. Their music kind of sounded like Hinder and they tried to look like Mötley Crüe. After the confusing name change, the band faded into Tooth & Nail record obscurity. The story of the strange band may have come to an end, but lead singer Caleb “Bones” Owens, has just begun. 


    I’M A CIGARETTE ROLLING DOWN A EMPTY ROAD IN THE NIGH LIKE A SHOOTING STAR. I heard this story and checked out this record thanks to Ethan Luck. If his name doesn’t ring a bell, it’s not surprising. Luck is a working musician who plays mostly in the studio these days. He has a podcast called The Pirate Satellite where he talks to his friends, mostly other musicians, about their work. Luck got his start as a guitarist for The O.C. Supertones. Later he went on to play in Demon Hunter and Relient K. He also was a touring guitarist with Kings of Leon and has too many credits to mention. Luck certainly knows music, so when I was going through back episodes of his podcast last year, I listened to his “Top 10 Records of 2017.” I knew some of the artists, but there were quite a few that had fallen between the cracks. Point-in-case, the EP, Make Me No King, of which the titular track is the song that I can’t get out of my head today.

    I’M A MIDNIGHT TRAIN KEEPING YOU AWAKE WHEN I COME HOME FROM THE BAR. Trading in his axe and death metal black for an acoustic and a man-in-black Johnny Cash outlaw style, Bones Owens’s lyrics are haunting. It’s the gospel music of the Southern Grotesque. It’s the broken hallelujahs of the characters of a Flannery O’Connor short story. It’s the rambler and the gambler waiting for God to cut them down. Many of the tracks on this EP talk about alcoholism. If this were commercial country, I would have dismissed this album as the Southern cliché. But somehow, through earnest songwriting, Owens invites you, dear listener, to insert your vice. What is tearing apart your relationship? This song has such a different feeling from anything else in this month’s playlist. It’s probably going to sound strange together, but the lyrics really do have to do with love. The line “I’m a photograph taken in the past/ but it wasn’t what you thought” got me thinking about love. Isn’t love about finding the real person underneath, flaws and all? It’s not a sexy romance novel: the sequel to Boy Meets Girl is Girl Meets Boy’s Vice. Inevitably the flowers you got for Valentine’s Day will fade and die. The chocolate will be consumed and forgotten about. The honeymoon ends, and everyone must get back to work. If you start a relationship to hide from yourself, your first love, you, will come back and try to screw it up. What happens next is life.



  • "In Love Again" by Colbie Caillet, Monday, February 15, 2021

     

    I’ve only been to the Honolulu International airport, but from the hour and a half I was there, I will tell the critics they are wrong. Hawaii is NOT overrated in the least. You can see the clearest water and the white sandy beaches from the airport. However, if you chew gum to make your ears pop on a flight, make sure that you bring it with you as the airport doesn’t sell it. So to escape the dreariness of a winter’s day, let’s listen to a track from Colbie Caillat‘s Malibu Sessions LP. I realize that the rest of the month, I’ve been freed from the obligation to write about love songs; however, who doesn’t love listening to Colbie Caillat? Listening to her reminds me of college when I first discovered this amazing musician in my dorm room when I needed calm music to drown out my roommate talking to his girl friend while I was trying to finish my literature class homework.

    THE SHADOWS OF YESTERDAY. It was Easter morning when I got a call from a friend. She had just broken up with her boyfriend and she was moving out of her dorm room. She called me to ride along with her to run some errands. I went along for emotional support because I was pretty sure my friend was going through a lot. However, rather than talking about what had happened, she turned to her plans for the summer. She asked me what I was doing. I said I’d probably just try to earn some money back home doing odd jobs for people at church. She then suggested something that would forever change my life. She had been putting the finishing touches on a piece for a writing course, but in order to finish it, she had to go to Yap, an island part of the Federated States of Micronesia. I didn’t have a passport. The ticket was insanely expensive. It was the beginning of April and we would leave at the end of May. I said yes.

    I WANNA FALL IN LOVE AGAIN, BUT THIS TIME…WITH NO REGRETS.  Colbie Caillat recorded The Malibu Sessions in 2016 and then joined a country group, Gone West, with her fiancé. However, last year the two broke up and Gone West called it quits. In my research, I see a lot of singers and bands called it quits around the same times. Eighties groups called it quits in the early nineties. Nineties groups called it quits in the early ’00s. There were a lot of groups that called it quits in 2008-2010 when the banking crisis spilled over to the music industry. Finally, I’ve noticed a lot of artists have been on a lengthy hiatus since 2016. Perhaps it’s hard to put words to the fact that the world is falling apart. Speaking of going silent, it’s very hard for me to write about going to Yap. I didn’t do much there, but I learned. It was my first time traveling outside of North America, and seeing how different the world was outside only made me want to see more of the world. I had seen what many people would consider paradise–beautiful beaches, clear water, drinking juice from a coconut–and I wondered what else the world had in store for me.

    https://genius.com/Colbie-caillat-in-love-again-lyrics

  • "Style" by Taylor Swift, Sunday, February 14, 2021

     

    I have a few confessions to make before getting into this post. First, I have only listened to folklore once or twice, and I’ve only listened to a few songs from evermore. As a music blogger, I have to do better. However, I’m waiting for the albums to hit me. I’m sure they will. Most music that sticks with me hits me at just the right minute. And there’s a lot of music to be impactful from decades of classic rock to thousands of pop records over the last few decades. Second confession, I’ve liked Taylor Swift since her Fearless days. I had heard of her from “Tear Drops on My Guitar,” but I got into her when I heard she had covered Luna Halo‘s “Untouchable.”  Taylor Swift became Nashville and the music industry’s darling and it seemed that everyone had some love for the teenage star. But teenagers grow up. 

    James Dean in Rebel without a 
    Cause,     1955 Photo by Laura Loveday,
    Flicker.

    YOU COME TO PICK ME UP, NO HEADLIGHTS. In 2014, the soon-to-be 25-year-old singer shook off her squeaky clean image (pun not intended) and turned to more mature subject matter. Her second single, “Blank Space,” satirized her love life based on the rumors she heard about herself. This was the start of a new Taylor Swift. Apart from sounding like the prelude to a traffic accident, “Style” is the first time that Taylor Swift’s lyrics get a little sexy. Style for Swift means a classic 1950s and ’60s look from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Allusions to James Dean, imagery of removing clothes, and bright red lipstick make this song may be enough, but the video makes the lyrics crystal clear. Furthermore, the song is said to be a clever pun on the relationship between Swift and Harry Styles. Still, unlike her shock-pop contemporaries like Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Lana Del Rey, and Katy Perry, Taylor Swift didn’t get explicit. Taylor Swift was not a spokeswoman for purity culture, which the Christians listening to her country records would have preferred. But instead in 1989–with the exception of “Blank Space”–sex is treated as something that adults do. It’s glamorized, but it doesn’t take the audience to the gutter. The conversation, of course, is different about male celebrities.

    COULD END IN BURNING FLAMES OR PARADISE. Today is Valentine’s Day. I wrote about thirteen love songs and one break up song. I used the songs as a tool to recall my memories about the songs themselves or what I was experiencing around the time that I listened to those songs. For me 2014-2015, were pivotal years in my life.  This album came out in October of 2014. I remember listening to “Shake it Off,” but it wasn’t until the summer of 2015 that I really got into this record. I learned so much about myself those years which started my journey discovering what faith, sexuality, love, and balancing a career means to me. This album was a soundtrack for that time as I dealt with falling in love and breaking up. It helped me feel normal in a way that most of the shame-based music I had listened to since high school hadn’t. I had to realize that everyone has a different path, and the ways in which I had been counseled were not right for me. I couldn’t fit myself into the mold. This lead to years of hating myself. I appreciate the media that I consumed in 2014-2015 because that was the time that I truly learned to value myself. Thanks Taylor!

    Read the lyrics on Genius.



    VOX explains why this song is so catchy using music theory:



  • “My Heartstrings Come Undone” by Demon Hunter, Saturday, February 13, 2021

    I’d like to imagine Ryan Clark sitting in freshman English class passing a love letter to some gothic girl, only to have the note intercepted. Perhaps the teacher had been lecturing on a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, and was rudely interrupted by the rustling of paper passed through the aisles of desks. The teacher resembles the late Alan Rickman and he reads the letter, muttering in his gravelly Severus Snape voice. “You see class,” he speaks up, “if you want the opposite sex to fall for you, a writer doesn’t merely say, ‘I will love you to death.’ The writer uses more vivid language to express the intentions of his heart.” Young Ryan Clark took this as a challenge and wrote the gothic love song that appears in my 2021 February Playlist.


    IT’S BURIED DEEP WITHIN THE PAST. In early April of my Junior year, my school went on a mission trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee. We did a lot of driving and listened to a lot of music during that time. Many of my classmates were into hardcore and metal, and Demon Hunter‘s Summer of Darkness album was about to be released. Somehow this song made its way onto a mixtape or a promo CD, and everyone was in awe of how cool this song was. The dark lyrics and demon imagery spoke to the group’s collective religiosity and turned the youth group to a darker shade. Gone were the days of Newsboys and Audio Adrenaline. Now everyone was obsessed with demonology. And this was a pretty good alternative to Harry Potter, right?

    THE DARK AESTHETIC. I wrote about Demon Hunter last month. Ryan Clark has talked about how Demon Hunter was an art project before it was a band on the Labeled podcast. He talks about the band is continuously influenced by bands like Nine Inch Nails on their latest albums. He talks about how Pink Floyd’s Wish You We Here album cover influenced his album artwork design on the Lead Singer Syndrome podcast. This caused him and his brother to create a highly successful graphic design company who has designed the most iconic album covers to the CDs I owned back in high school and a plethora of other projects including work commissioned by NASA, Target, and other companies. Clark is a versatile artist working, so not everything is dark and dreary. However, for his personal aesthetic, it gets dark. From screaming at the gates of hell to singing about to dying of old age–rather decaying, with his wife. 

  • "Everything" by Lifehouse, Friday, February 12, 2021

     

    Before The Fray and OneRepublic, Lifehouse was the pop-rock band that appeared with their song “Hanging by a Moment” and then crossed over to the Christian market. Their debut album, No Name Face garnered a lot of love both in the Christian and pop markets. Songs like “Hanging By a Moment” and “Breathing” were huge Top 40 hits, while the song “Sick Cycle Carousel” was a hit on the Christian radio stations. The band signed a deal with Sparrow Records for their second album, Stanley Climbfall, and solidified their hold in the Christian market and lessened their hold on mainstream radio. However, their third and self-titled album produced their biggest pop hit “You and Me” and their fourth album Who We Are, lessened their grip on the Christian market. And by their fifth through seventh albums the band’s pop appeal had diminished as their post-grunge sound fell out of favor with pop radio. 

    HOW COULD ANYTHING BE BETTER THAN THIS? If we’re going to talk about this song, we have to talk about Smallville. Honestly, I don’t think this show has aged well. I’d have to rewatch it to find out. Maybe it just went on too long and outlived the writers intentions. CGI from old shows is embarrassing. What looked so realistic before is hard to watch. That’s what I noticed when I watched The Matrix: Reloaded just 10 years ago. Maybe its stars never really went on to do much. Except for Allison Mack, of course, who played the fan’s favorite character, Chloe, who was in love with young Clark Kent and kept track of all of the weird things that happened around town on her Wall of Weird. Something she didn’t pin on the Wall of Weird that certainly belongs there is Allison Mack’s involvement with the NXIVM cult. For that reason, rewatching Smallville will be a very hard task. But let’s go back past the ridiculous later seasons to the core that made the show what it was. It was a high school drama, so let’s keep the kids in school. I first started watching the show because of the music. The early seasons were focused on music. I watched the first three seasons on ABC Family. The show was squeaky clean until Season 4. A cliche small-town romance with a supernatural twist. The origin story of Superman, rebooted for Millennials. 

    BECAUSE YOU’RE ALL I NEED. Lifehouse performed on Smallville twice and songs from their first three albums were included in the shows first four seasons. The pilot ends with this song. Clark is looking out his telescope, looking at the stars thinking about his crush, Lana Lang. He then imagines that she has saved a dance from the Homecoming dance for him. In the season finale, Lifehouse performs this song in the Smallville High prom, only to be interrupted by a tornado warning. Lifehouse and other music served as a musical soundtrack to the drama in this series, heightening moments of romance, tensions between characters, like Lex and his emotionally abusive father, Lionel, and moments of self discovery as Clark realizes his powers and purposes for them. Cheesy? Perhaps. But it was the early 2000s on the WB/CW network. This was around the time of Dawson’s Creek and Gilmore Girls. Only Smallville was a supernatural teen drama. I miss when music played such a big role in television.

  • Rust by Tyson Motsenbocker, February 11, 2021

     

    Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot–the legendary folk singers of North America have interesting stories to tell, but only if you listen closely. Tooth & Nail Records signed Tyson Motsenbocker as a solo artist back in 2016 beginning a new direction for the label. I first checked out Motsenbocker after hearing his story on The BadChristian Podcast  where he talked about how his foot journey between San Diego and San Francisco informed the lyrics to his first LP, Letters to Lost Loves. Motsenbocker followed up his full length with two EPs the next year.  The song I chose for today comes from the EP Almira, which is a perfect winter’s day record. 

    I SAW THE SUN COMING UP. I promised a break-up song at the beginning of the month. And although technically “This Love” could count, we’re still calling it a love song. This song is dedicated to 2020. Today is the first of a three-day holiday in South Korea and other countries in the Sinosphere (East Asian countries that get a large part of their culture or influence from China) celebrating the lunar new year, aka Chinese New Year. Every lunar year has a zodiac symbol. There are 12 symbols total, and just like western astrology there are special meanings for each symbol. The difference to the western zodiac is that every year rather than month has the same characteristics. This is partially why age and the idea of chingu (친구) is so important in Korea. I wrote about Korean age in my January 3rd post “Age” by From the Airport. Many Koreans celebrate both solar (January 1st) and lunar (Seollar/Chinese New Year) New Year’s Day by staying up all night, climbing a mountain or driving to the coast and watching the sunrise, eating rice-cake soup (떡국), meeting family and bowing to elders and ancestors, thanking them for their prosperity.
    ALL METAL RUSTS. Tomorrow is Lunar New Year’s Day, so today is kind of like a Lunar New Year’s Eve. Celebrations are going to be kept to a minimum here in South Korea as gathers are restricted to only four people outside of your immediate family. Last year we welcomed the Year of the Rat. However, by last Lunar New Year’s Day, January 25, 2020, South Korea and the United States had already had their first cases of the plague. The year of the rat brought an infestation of destruction we’ve never seen in our lifetimes. So many things changed suddenly. The safety precautions kept changing. Many people lost everything. So much change left us hardened, rusted even to the new normal. Tomorrow, begins the Year of the Ox. The cow will crush the rat and we can hope for better…but let’s not forget that cows introduced tuberculosis to humans.

  • "All These Things" by OneRepublic, Wednesday, February 10, 2021

    Ryan Tedder might be the most successful pop musician to have graduated from Oral Roberts University, an Evangelical college founded by the evangelist of the same name and which spawned preachers such as Kenneth Copeland, Joel Osteen, and Ted Haggard. I remember when OneRepublic debuted in 2007 with their song “Apologize.” Tedder talked about his religious background in interviews and how he was influenced by CCM music when he was growing up. Another group, The Fray, had debuted two years before OneRepublic with a similar story and hometown in Colorado. Christian radio fell hard for The Fray, playing songs like “How to Save a Life” and “You Found Me” on Christian radio stations. They didn’t fall in love with OneRepublic quite as much. Both bands were multi-platinum bands, but OneRepublic stuck around longer than The Fray whose third and fourth albums failed to achieve the greatness of their first two albums. 


    YESTERDAY’S GONE. I discovered this song last May. “All These Things” is not a hit and it is in the middle of the album. I haven’t kept up with OneRepublic’s career past their second album 2009’s Waking Up. Pop-rock kind of gets old after a while. However, the lyrics of this song stuck with me. In the middle of the pandemic, the school schedule kept changing and the supervisors kept changing the expectations of students and teachers. We had never taught online before, and although we had used many resources to create class materials, we had never met students online. To make matters worse we were given no time to learn how to do it. We were just told to do it. One of my coworkers threw himself into learning technology. He spent his weekends working and creating content. But he got pretty burnt out. Sure, he was experiencing more success than others, but they were able to use what he learned and mostly have their weekends off. The burnout my coworker experienced made me think about what in life is really worth investing your time in.

    GIVE YOU MY YOUTH FOR SOME MILLION DAYS. This line from the song made me think about the investment in time. I had to do the math. One million days is 2,739.73 years, a number that far exceeds a lifetime. In Korea, anniversaries are counted in days rather than years. Parents celebrate a baby’s 100th day of life. This has roots in a time of high infant mortality, and a baby that survived 100 days was to be celebrated as a successful life. Similarly, Korean couples (and some foreigners who date Koreans) celebrate the first 100 days of their relationship. With every 100 days, a relationship is celebrated and evaluated. Is it worth the time and effort? Today is a very special day because it marks my 2000th day in a relationship. 2000 days is nowhere close to a million, but a lot can happen in that amount of time. For some context, Apple TV+ has a documentary series called Becoming You which follows children from around the world for from birth to their 2000th day. A 5 1/2 year old child has learned how to walk, talk, tell a simple joke, goes to school, counts to 100, and can help out a parent do tasks. Two thousand days can span the tail-end of a presidency, a very bad one-term presidency, and the first days of yet another president. Korean conscription is only 36% of 2,000 days. It spans the time of six one-year contracts. Korean middle school students in their second semester will have graduated high school in 2000 days. I don’t take today lightly. I believe I’ve spent my time well. We never know for sure if things are going to work out, but the investment of time and effort can make a very happy life.

  • “Way Back Home” by Shaun, Tuesday, February 9, 2021

     

    In 2018, South Korean indie rock band The Koxx’s keyboardist, Shaun, debuted with a solo single that immediately went to number 1 on the K-pop charts.  Obsessed with chart numbers, K-pop fans cried foul. But were the charts manipulated? How could a relatively unknown singer-songwriter blow up the charts? The world of K-pop is rather cutthroat when it comes to fans and from my research it seems that the matter hasn’t been settled to anyone’s liking. Still, how can an artist or record company manipulate the charts? The Korea Herald explains. Once the song had topped the charts, it was everywhere in Korea and even made waves in other countries. Shaun worked with English singer-songwriter Connor Maynard to produce an English version. This version has been misappropriated by Justin Bieber online.

    MY LONG, LONG JOURNEY ENDS NOW. The Mandela Effect is a situation that people (often large groups of people) misremember the facts of something that happened in the past. The situation gets its name from people who claimed to remember that they had heard that Nelson Mandela had died in prison back in the ’90s. I don’t remember exactly when I first heard this song, but it was everywhere. I also suffered from Mandela Effect. I could swear I had heard this song since I had been in Korea. I thought it was an old song from the ’90s. But in fact, it has only been out since June of 2018 and I have been in Korea since 2012. I wrote about this on February 1st when I talked about SHINee’s music. K-pop often uses the vaguely familiar in the same way pop music uses the millennial whoop to keep music sounding both classic and new at the same time.

    I’LL FIND MY WAY BACK HOME. Poetry doesn’t translate well, so of course some of the nuisance is lost in a song. The English lyric translation for this song aren’t the same as the Conor Maynard version. Korean is a much more versatile language than English because of the Subject-Object-Verb sentence pattern. Verbs often end in “yo”s, “ah”s or “-nida”s so it’s pretty easy to make rhymes in the language. The lyrics of this song deal with an unrelenting love that no matter how you try to quench it continues. It also talks about a journey that the singer takes, but the singer is sure that the path he takes will lead him home again. So that’s the message of this love song as we count down the days to Valentine’s Day: “I always wind up by your side.” 

    Lyric Video:
    featuring Connor Maynard:

    Acoustic performance:

    Conor Maynard English version: