Look at the Sky

On Wednesday, January 27, 2021, Porter Robinson released a new song entitled "Look at the Sky". It is amazing.

"Look at the Sky" is the fourth and penultimate single of Robinson's forthcoming album, Nurture, which is scheduled for release on April 23, 2021. Nurture will be Robinson's second album—he has not released a full-length album under his own name since Worlds all the way back in 2014. Nuture's first single, "Get Your Wish", was Robinson's first release under his own name since his monumental collaboration with Madeon "Shelter" in 2016, and the first overall since his Virtual Self project in 2018.

Worlds was an incredibly influential album within electronic music, but for Robinson, it was a double-edged sword. In messages to his fans, Robinson explained that over the past few years, he has felt a profound sense of pressure to beat his success with Worlds. In a tweet he published about a year ago about "Get Your Wish", Robinson wrote:

I was doing really badly in 2015, 2016 and early 2017. My entire life revolved around making music, but for the first time in my life, I was struggling to make anything at all. I was desperate to make something I was proud of, but the more I struggled, the worse the problem became. I was very seriously depressed and genuinely thought my life as I knew it was over.

It was almost three years of trying to write music, failing, and being crushed by it every single day.

Indeed, numerous artists experience a so-called "sophomore slump" after their debut albums launch them into mainstream popularity, and Robinson put a lot of pressure on himself to avoid this. He was stressing so much about never being able to outdo his success with Worlds, but immediately after he sings about overcoming that stress, he outdoes his success with Worlds.

According to Robinson himself, "'Look at the Sky' is fundamentally a song about hope."

There’s no shortage of fuel for despair, but you can’t take meaningful action to improve things if you don’t have some belief that things might get better. That’s what hope is, and I think it’s an emotion worth nourishing. I wrote this song at my lowest point emotionally, when I thought I couldn’t make music anymore, and I wasn’t sure if my existence would have any meaning if I couldn’t make music. In the lyrics, I’m sort of imagining what life would be like once I was on the other side of all that fear and anxiety and sadness. I’m happy to report that it’s amazing on the other side of all this, and I’m so glad I had hope and persisted.

Today, millions upon millions of people around the world remain affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Porter Robinson surely must have been cognizant of the timing of when he would release this particular song, which contains a blissfully optimistic message about hope. It goes without saying that life could be a lot better for a lot of us right now, and perhaps this is Robinson's way of saying, "I get it. I've been there."

Whenever I listen to the song's chorus, I am reminded of Pixar's newest movie Soul, about which I wrote a blog post last month. In that movie, there is a character named 22 who is afraid that she might never be able to find a specific purpose that would give meaning to her life. However, over the course of the film, she realizes that some of the most meaningful aspects of life have nothing to do with any kind of clearly identifiable "purpose". As a matter of fact, 22 specifically mentions "sky-watching" as one such aspect, and one of the key visuals during Joe Gardner's "epiphany" montage is a view of the nighttime sky, with its brilliant array of stars, planets, and galaxies. Essentially, the core message of "Look at the Sky" is the same as the core message of Soul. Yes, life sucks sometimes—perhaps now even more so than ever—but whenever we stop to appreciate Little Things like the sky, it is always possible to find hope.

The song ultimately reminds me of a famous quote from the 1989 film Dead Poets Society starring Robin Williams. I've posted the quote onto this blog before, but I think it is such a brilliant perspective that it's worth repeating:

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering—these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love—these are what we stay alive for.

To quote from Whitman, "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring, of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish, what good amid these, O me, O life?" Answer: That you are here—that life exists, and identity—that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and its devastating impact on the economy, "Look at the Sky" reminds us that there is more to life than just the depressing. Through the song, Robinson asks himself, "What good amid these, O me, O life?" He finds an answer after gazing upwards, just as 22 did in Soul: "That you are here ... that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse." This is Porter Robinson's verse, and it is indeed something good.