This World and Me

On the evening of May 21, 1925—exactly 100 years ago—a Japanese Akita dog named Hachiko left his home, as he always did, and walked to Shibuya Station in Tokyo to greet his owner, Hidesaburo Ueno, as he came home from work. This was a daily routine for the two of them: every day, Hachiko would meet Ueno at the train station, and every day, they would walk home together. On this day, however, Ueno would not return. He had died after suffering a stroke while at work. For the next nine years, nine months, and fifteen days, Hachiko would return to Shibuya Station every day to wait for Ueno to come home. I thought of Hachiko the moment I first listened to the song "Humansongs" by Porter Robinson. The song tells the story of a robot who, like Hachiko, waits for his human owner to return. Porter Robinson released "Humansongs" in March 2023. He described the song as a "demo", made to promote Po-uta, a Vocaloid voicebank based on the singing voice he used for his ...

  Whenever I play Porter Robinson's song "Everything Goes On", my friends see that the song is a collaboration with League of Legends , and this immediately colors their impression. A piece of me dies every time this happens because you don't have to know anything about League of Legends to enjoy this song. I personally know very little about the gameplay and lore surrounding League of Legends , yet "Everything Goes On" stands among my favorite songs of all time. Despite its sparkly instrumentation and uplifting chords, "Everything Goes On" is a song about grief. The lyrics are from the perspective of someone who does not have much longer to live. The song opens with the chorus, where the singer tries to convince someone to forget about him after he is gone. The song tells a story about a time when the singer actually said the words in the chorus, and the verses flow from the singer attempting to justify those words, to later regretting the...

Song of the Week #12 is "RPG" by Sekai no Owari . Sekai no Owari is a Japanese pop band whose name translates to "End of the World". The band is so named because Fukase, the lead vocalist, was in a period of depression at the time he founded the band. He saw making music as the one thing left for him during a time that felt like the end of the world. I stumbled across Sekai no Owari because they once did a couple collaborations with the American musician Owl City. Anyone who has been a friend of mine for a while, or who has been a reader of this blog for a while, will know that I used to be quite into Owl City. (Owl City has not released new music since 2018, so my interests have since shifted, but it looks like he may be on track to release some more music in 2022.) In 2014, Sekai no Owari featured on an Owl City song called "Tokyo" , and in 2015, Owl City (under his real name Adam Young) was the producer of the Sekai no Owari song "Mr. Heartache...

Song of the Week #11 is "It's Not Living (If It's Not With You)" by The 1975. For a long time, I thought this was a love song. In my defense, there were several factors that misled me towards this incorrect conclusion. For starters, the song is on an album entitled A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships (2018). Additionally, the title of the song—"It's Not Living (If It's Not With You)"—gives the impression that it is about a person. To top it all off, the song sounds happy . If you fail to pay close attention to the lyrics (as I did), you might think it is one of the most upbeat songs on the entire album, if not the most upbeat-sounding song in The 1975's entire discography. It is all a clever deception. The song is about drugs. Specifically, "It's Not Living (If It's Not With You)" is about the former heroin addiction of The 1975's lead vocalist, Matty Healy, who co-wrote the song with fellow band members George Dan...

Song of the Week #10 is "Deine Nähe tut mir weh" by Revolverheld . When I first did this song of the week thing back in 2017, I wanted to avoid repeating artists. However, that immediately proved a futile endeavor. I have written about the German band Revolverheld no less than three times on this blog before now: check out my posts on "Das kann uns keiner nehmen" , "Ich lass für dich das Licht an" , and "Bands deiner Jugend" . All three are from the 2013 album Immer in Bewegung , and the song I discuss today—"Deine Nähe tut mir weh"—comes from the same album. In my view, Immer in Bewegung is quite the masterpiece within German pop music, and there is not a single song on the album I dislike. I got into Revolverheld after one of my German instructors in my freshman year of college introduced me to them. "Deine Nähe tut mir weh" is in German. The title of the song means "your closeness hurts me". The song starts with ...

Back in 2017, I published a series of blog posts that discussed one song every week. I had eight of these "Song of the Week" posts until I lost interest. I would like to resume the series. Song of the Week #9 is "Borealis" by Madeon . Released in 2019, "Borealis" is the last song on the Good Faith album. In my view, it is the spiritual successor to the landmark song "Shelter" by Madeon and Porter Robinson. I wrote about "Shelter" on this blog in May 2017. [Verse 1] A light from dark, In a land by the sea, Came from the sky. You'll be named after me. I discovered "Shelter" at a particularly timely moment in my life: when I was just about to leave my parents' house for the first time to attend college thousands of miles away. Whereas "Shelter" was a song about expressing appreciation for one's parents, "Borealis" is something of a reply from the parent to the child, who is named af...

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 ...

Song of the Week #7 is "The Jedi Steps and Finale" by John Williams . I'm excited to finally share some film soundtrack music as my song of the week! John Williams is, of course, the front runner of film soundtrack music. His scores have ingrained themselves deeply into popular culture across the world. From Star Wars  to Harry Potter  to Jaws  to  Jurassic Park  – chances are high that even if you haven't seen these films, you've heard their main themes before, especially Star Wars' " The Imperial March ". A significant part of why I am a  Star Wars  fan is the music. The music of  Star Wars  has a special kind of magic that extends beyond the films that it accompanies. No other film franchise on Earth truly parallels  Star Wars  in terms of renown, influence, and emotional character. There are a plethora of themes and leitmotifs sprinkled throughout the scores that make listening to them and identifying them like explorin...

Song of the Week #6 is "Halley Came to Jackson" by Mary Chapin Carpenter . This semester I am taking Introduction to General Astronomy (ASTRO C10 / L&S C70U) as a general education course at the University of California, Berkeley. Before each lecture, my professor, Alex Filippenko, usually plays a song that is related to the content we will cover in that lecture. For example, before a lecture that discussed time (among other things), he played  "Time" by Pink Floyd , and before a lecture that discussed the planet Jupiter, he played  "Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity", the fourth movement of Gustav Holst's  The Planets . Before a lecture that discussed comets, my professor played for us "Halley Came to Jackson". The title of the song refers to Halley's Comet , a famous comet that appears in the night sky approximately every 76 years. "Jackson" probably refers to Jackson, Mississippi , the capital of the state of Mississip...

Song of the Week #5 is  "Ich lass für dich das Licht an" by Revolverheld . When I started this weekly series of posts a few weeks ago (see  the first post  for more information), I wanted to bring as much variety as possible. To achieve this, I attempted until now to avoid using two songs from the same artist. However, I discovered such a heartwarming, beautiful music video for this equally heartwarming and beautiful song that I knew I  had  to share it somehow. The music video is performed by the German band Revolverheld, which also performs the song "Das kann uns keiner nehmen" that I had as my second Song of the Week . Like "Das kann uns keiner nehmen", the song is sung in German, a language which I have studied in school for over four years now. The title, "Ich lass für dich das Licht an", means "I leave the light on for you". In the first couple of minutes of the video, which has English subtitles (on YouTube, you have switch on...

Song of the Week #4 is "Fresh Static Snow" by Porter Robinson . I'm excited to finally share some of Porter's music as my song of the week. I've written about one of his other songs before: his phenomenal "Shelter" , on which he collaborated with French electronic music producer Madeon. "Fresh Static Snow" is the fifth song off Robinson's 2014 album Worlds . Worlds  is a departure from the kind of harsher bass-heavy, high-BPM electronic dance music that Robinson produced early in his career. "Fresh Static Snow" is no exception. This is not dance music for the sake of dance music. The beat is moderately paced, and though it still uses bass to provide its main hook, the song has a far more melodic and more artistic feel than his previous works once the vocals kick in. The vocals themselves are provided by  Avanna , which is a part of the  Vocaloid voice synthesizer program . In other words, it is a computer singing the song, n...

Song of the Week #3 is actually a combination of two tracks called "Desiderium 207" and "Mirage", both by Armin van Buuren . This is the third part of a weekly series of posts: check out my very first one for more details. The reason I am presenting them together is because they were made to go together; "Desiderium 207" is the first track on Armin van Buuren's 2010 album Mirage , and "Mirage" is the second. The two tracks flow directly into one another. Whenever I need to refer to the two tracks together by name, I will simply use "Mirage". To explain, nowadays, albums usually consist of tracks, each of which can stand on their own. As I understand it, this has been influenced heavily by the advent of digital download as a medium through which consumers may obtain music. With digital download, people can choose specific songs on albums to download on their own, and in programs like iTunes, you can choose specific tracks on alb...

Song of the Week #2 is "Das kann uns keiner nehmen" by Revolverheld . This is the second part of a weekly series of posts that I have started doing: see my post last week for more information about it. "Das kann uns keiner nehmen" is sung in German. The title means "no one can take that from us", and it is the second song off Revolverheld's 2013 album Immer in Bewegung  (German for Always in Motion ). I've been learning the German language for about 4 years now—since my freshman year of high school and still now in my freshman year of college. It was actually my graduate student instructor (GSI) in my first semester at UC Berkeley who introduced me to this song. Almost every day, she would play a German song for us as we prepared for class. We could even suggest songs for her to play. As I was unpacking my notebook and pencils from my backpack before class, she began to play "Das kann uns keiner nehmen". I was not listening closely e...