This World and Me

I have a pet peeve that comes up when I talk with someone about a song, a film, a TV show, or perhaps a book. Occasionally, one of my friends will describe such a work as objectively good or objectively bad . These phrases will always cause me to raise an eyebrow. What exactly are the objective factors that determine the quality of a creative work? I can think of a few ideas, but each seem problematic. My first thought is numbers. We could sample from a group of people who have experienced a particular work and ask them whether they think the work is "good". If a supermajority says yes, then the work is objectively good ; if a supermajority says no, then the work is objectively bad ; if there is no clear answer, then the work is objectively neither good nor bad . This method is questionable because it seems to rely heavily on mere popularity. To use an adage that one of my high school English teachers had on her little podium: "What is popular is not always right, and ...

Song of the Week #8 is "If My Heart Was a House" by Owl City . This week, I'm excited to be talking about another song from my favorite musician. Seven weeks ago, the very first song of the week was "Cave In" from Owl City's spectacular  Ocean Eyes  album. "If My Heart Was a House" is a somewhat more obscure song – it's track number 6 on disc 2 of the deluxe version of Ocean Eyes  – but that doesn't make it any less powerful. In a music ranking survey conducted on the forum /r/OWLCITY on the website Reddit in 2016, "If My Heart Was a House" was voted the song that forum subscribers would choose to listen to over any other song created by Adam Young, the man behind Owl City. "If My Heart Was a House" is a song about love. If that part is not immediately apparent from the title, it becomes apparent within the first few seconds of the song. You're the sky that I fell through, And I remember the view, Whenever ...

Today, I'd like to try something new. I haven't been posting as often to this blog this year as I did in 2016. Much of this is due to a lack of creative energy. There are several draft posts that I've started, but I either don't know how to go about finishing them or don't feel motivated enough to do so. Some of the topics I have spent the last few months drafting are challenging to write about. For example, there's a draft about goodbyes that touches upon various goodbyes I've had to experience throughout my life and how they've shaped me, and there's also a draft I've procrastinated on for almost a year now about my thoughts on the competitiveness of the music industry, and there's another one about the similarities between Shakespearean comedy and a modern animated film series. As I've drafted these posts, I found myself frustrated by my inability to articulate precisely what I feel, which perhaps stems from an underlying uncertainty a...

Anyone who knows me well knows that my favorite musician is Adam Young, the guy who created Owl City. What a lot of people don't know is that Adam Young has created several other projects in addition to Owl City. Whereas the Owl City project creates most of its music with electronic beats and melodies, Young's Sky Sailing project uses more acoustic instrumentation, and Young's eponymous "film score" project  draws inspiration from many varieties of soundtrack from orchestral to a cool country acoustic to lightweight electronic. Port Blue is an ambient music project that involves elements of both acoustic and electronic instrumentation with a quasi-film score feel. I love it. After Owl City released its fourth studio album, The Midsummer Station  (2012), the project saw an immense musical hiatus spanning several years. In the entire year of 2013, the only real Owl City music released was contained within  The Midsummer Station Acoustic EP  (2013), which had acou...

Tie my handlebars to the stars so I stay on track, And if my intentions stray, I'll wrench them away, Then I'll take my leave, and I won't even look back. —Owl City, " Cave In ", 2009

Two weeks ago, I posted about intention and its relevance in homicide law. We spend a great deal of time and effort on criminal trials with the goal of ascertaining a person's intentions when they caused the death of another person. In different areas of the law, a certain intention can mitigate the severity of the punishment while other intentions can exacerbate the severity of the punishment. In other areas of the law, intention matters nothing at all. Nevertheless, intention undoubtedly plays an important role in how we go about our lives. We often excuse mistakes if they were made unwittingly – that is, "on accident" – but we are less sympathetic to harmful actions if they were committed with the intention of doing so. There is an aspect of this world, however, where intention is important, but in a different way. That aspect of the world is interpretation. * * * The definition of "interpretation" is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,  the ac...

On March 1, Minnesotan musician Adam Young released the second album in  his conceptual film score project . Last month, I posted about this new project. I was ecstatic, as I saw it as the beginning of Young's return to the grassroots style that he started with—the style I fell in love with. In case you don't know him, Young is perhaps most famous for being the creative mastermind behind Owl City, an electronic music project which has slowly morphed from a dreamy, unique vibe to an almost exclusively pop scene. Young is taking a break from the pop music realm to return to that organic, individualized music production of the good ol' days, releasing a 12-track conceptual "film score" every month for the rest of 2016. Each such score will musically narrate Young's interpretation of a famous historical or fictional event. Each album will be available to stream and download for free on his website. February's score was about the 1969 Apollo 11 spaceflight t...

I am in a state of bliss right now. Pure ecstasy. For on this first day of February, two thousand sixteen, American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and Minnesotan music producer Adam Young released his first album as "Adam Young." I've posted before about Mr. Young. He is more widely known for Owl City, one of many musical projects he has created over the years. One of Owl City's songs, "Fireflies," propelled him into the international spotlight and peaked at position one on the national charts of seven countries. Today's album epitomizes exactly what draws me to Owl City and the ingenious man behind it. Every single instrument, every single lyric, every single sound—the overwhelming majority of Owl City was conceived, written, produced, engineered, recorded, and mastered by only one person. Owl City is often mistaken for a band, because (until today) Young doesn't use his own name for his musical endeavors. "Owl City" is mor...

It started when I was 12. I was one third of the way through middle school, having just completed sixth grade. It was perhaps the last time I felt totally stress-free. College and high school felt eons away, and the childish play of elementary school had yet to wear off. The year was 2011, the same year my family bought its first "smart" mobile device: a 32 GB black Wi-Fi-only Apple iPad 2. Naturally, the decision to buy the device was lobbied mostly by me, and when the shiny new product made its way to my hands, I couldn't wait to try out the features that I had waited for in anticipation. The first app I opened was Photo Booth—the iPad 2 was the first of its kind to feature a camera. I was oblivious to most social issues of the world, and as a tween, I probably wouldn't have cared all that much anyway. School was out, vacation was here, life was good. The June of that same year, my family and I traveled to China to visit my extended family. The trip to China, let ...

In the past, I've written about what music means for me , but I haven't yet touched upon the actual kinds  of music I  personally like. I get asked fairly often while meeting new people, "What kind of music do you like?" I can usually answer with a one-sentence summary. If you asked me right now, I would probably say, "oh yeah I've recently started getting into some electronic dance music, and my favorite artist is Owl City." What? Owl City? Why do you like Owl City? Well, if you really want to understand my tastes, it would take a lot longer than a one-sentence summary--perhaps even more than what I can contain in the size of a blog post. But I'll try. In order to truly understand my musical tastes, I have to explain how music came into my life, and what my relationship with music is. I started my journey into music naïvely. Keep in mind that my parents immigrated to the United States from China just a few years before I was born. So, growing up i...