Codedna.me

Owl City - Nonsense with Feeling

This is the first of a series of essays about my favorite musicians and what makes their work engaging to me.

Adam Young has one of those stories that all artists crave - plucked seemingly at random from obscurity by the internet, thereby earning enough money to become a full-time music creator, under the name Owl City. Of course, the whole story is more complex, and includes many nights in his parents’ basement, hard at work. Young channeled his insomnia into synthesizing and mixing whimsical flights of fancy with sharp hooks and bell-toned riffs that are difficult to forget.

I think the title Owl City is an apt one, at once meaningless and evocative, like many of the tracks Young produces. When I say ‘meaningless’ I don’t mean ‘gibberish,’ but ‘nonsensical;’ the words connect thoughts that aren’t used to being connected. For example, the first verse of Owl City’s biggest hit, Fireflies:

You would not believe your eyes
If ten million fireflies
Lit up the world as I fell asleep

‘Cause they fill the open air
And leave teardrops everywhere
You’d think me rude, but I would just stand and stare

There’s a story here, a flow, but it has a dreamlike quality, intensely metaphorical. How is the singer standing and staring after they fall asleep? Whence the ten million fireflies? These are not the right questions. The lyrics’ goal is to evoke a mood, and when I’m biking downtown on a summer evening, seeing lights in all the windows, and think of this song, my sensations get tied into the tapestry in my head that I see every time I hear Fireflies.

That is the genius of this kind of lyricism - it is vague enough to apply to many situations and people, who then become attached to it because of their investment in it. Of course, most if not all music does this, but Owl City’s best songs seem made to tap into those roots, at least to me.

Young’s more recent albums contain some less abstract tracks like This Isn’t the End, which while still sounding good, don’t quite live up to his original style in my opinion. It must also be said, and has been before, that his vocals are nothing special, and attempts to spruce them up with or without computer assistance don’t really help. But those are quibbles that do not touch the core of what makes Owl City good music. (And if you can’t stand the vocals, Young released one well-produced soundtrack every month for a year.)