Hello! It’s a been a while. If you didn’t already know, I’ve been swimming in a sea of depression after closing down the nonprofit I’ve been with for the past seven years. So, although I have plenty of room and desire in my heart to write and be creative with my recent abundance of free time, it’s hard to be clever under these conditions. My brain needs to watch back to back episodes of Drag Race every waking moment that I’m not overcommitting to volunteer work in order to fight off the existential dread. Boots the house down, am I right???
That said, Halloween is around the corner and that deserves a Perfect Song. So strap on your devil horns, throw on a sheet, snap on some fangs, and meet me in the graveyard, because love is a ghost.
Today’s perfect song is “Familiar” by Agnes Obel from the album Citizen of Glass (2016).
Agnes Obel is a precise and flawless vocalist who isn’t afraid to make it weird. I would argue that one of the most important elements of this song is the heavily reverbed “tahh” that punctuates each bar. I love when a singer uses their mouth like percussion. It can sometimes make the lyrics hard to decipher, so it’s especially thrilling when you find out there’s hidden poetry underneath the layers of alluring and mysterious mouth sounds.
If you don’t get chills when that chorus kicks in, I don’t know what to say except that I feel sorry for you. The impact of the shift in instrumentation and introduction of vocals that I can only describe as softly demonic makes an arresting transition. If you’re a real Hexteria fan, you know I love a good monster effect on the vocals (the song “Bad City” is nothing without that Danelectro Chili Dog octave pedal on the vox).
A song after my own heart, it sounds like hundreds of unique elements. Piano, cello, violin, something dulcimer-esque, snapping, clapping, and you can almost pick up some banjo plucking in the chorus amidst the orchestral string arrangements. There are so many elements in this song I have a hard time identifying them all. But I don’t need to, because they’re all working seamlessly together to create a very complex and rich textural tapestry.
This song reaches into your chest to present you with your own beating heart. It’s a gothic love story with an ASMR twist. It floats through your window at night, a kinetic mist in the shape of whatever or whoever has created the largest hole in your soul.
It’s a hypnotist.
It’s a comfort.
It’s a danger,
Tonya <3
PS: You can find this song on the Halloween playlist I made on Spotify last year called Glimmer.
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