Something New, and Day 1: White Night – Hayden Calnin

I’ll never write an autobiography. It’s too much work to write about myself. (But Audrey, you have a blog. Yeah yeah. Whatever.) It seems like in order to write an autobiography you have to have an impeccable memory of exactly how things have happened to you and exactly when they happened. I can barely remember what I wore to work last week.

I can’t always remember exact events in my life and how they played out, but I can usually remember how they made me feel. I remember excitement on my first day of school – the smell of the hot pebbles on the early September playground, my kindergarten teacher’s motherly voice, having my very own desk. I remember sadness when my third grade best friend moved away – laying in my mom’s lap crying, the taste of tears on my lips. I remember embarassment when I left a college after staying there a week – that nausea in the pit of my stomach, the heat of August in southern Michigan. Those feelings are still with me, even if the exact details are blurry.

Oftentimes, those feelings and times of my life are attached to songs. Music that’s important to me (and most people) is important because it evokes a feeling. You attach it to something important that’s happened to you. I played with Legos with my brother when I was six while we listened to the Star Wars scores. Those soundtracks bring me right back to our metropolis of Legos that we built on the stairs up to our parents’ bedroom (they didn’t love that.) I played Ben Rector’s music on my first drive by myself with a shiny new license. I attach songs to people, places, and things – who doesn’t? That’s the power of music.

So instead of an autobiography, I have music. It can tell a much richer story than I can through words. It can explain how I feel before I even have to say a word. For the next 30 days, I’m going to be “reading” you different bits of this autobiography, as it were. If you dare venture onto my Spotify playlist, I’ve compiled a huge tome of music that has meant something to me over the years. I’ve whittled it down to the 30 juiciest bits (sorry, shouldn’t have phrased it like that) that hold the most weight to me.

And this is day one. Gather round, children, it’s storytime.

DAY ONE: White Night – Hayden Calnin (Thrupence Remix)
This song contains language.

I normally don’t like remixes. In most instances, they’re obnoxious and contrived. Maybe it’s because I heard Thrupence’s remix before I heard Calnin’s original, but I prefer Thrupence’s subtlety over Calnin’s heavy handed synth bed. Listening to Calnin’s original, you might feel like you’ve landed yourself in an 80s movie. Thrupence’s simple bed of exposed keys lends itself much better to Calnin’s husky vocals. Listening to this version, you can hear how truly raw the lyrics are:

Yeah I’m comin’ out of my cave to find truth
Yeah I’m summin’ up my time in my young youth
And I’m pickin’ up the pace of the thrill
Listening to the emptiness I feel, I feel 

Hayden Calnin and Thrupence (whose real name is Jack Vanzet) both hail from Australia. They’re up and coming electronic artists who are already making waves, at least in their homeland. Thrupence’s symphonic take on Calnin’s truly heart-wrenching piece is evocative of a sumptuous dance – a push and pull, swelling and receding. (Watch this beautiful music video of someone setting this remix to dance.) Calnin croons about his strong feelings toward the one he loved turning into hatred. In the second verse, his protagonist starts to disconnect – he takes to drinking and drugs to ease his pain, and he’s “taking girls home that I think are pretty – I’m no good at being alone.” It’s hard to determine exactly what happened – did she cheat? Did he detach? Was there a fight? You can feel the “falling” sensation in the chorus:

Then we fall to the deep
I’ve lost all my grip on you
We’ve been wrong all along
You know gravity pulls us in
To crawl while we’re weak, a sh*t place to be
And love was all that we’ve known
But the truth it holds us in

In the final chorus, the last line changes, and we know how he feels – she messed up. (He puts it a bit more strongly than that.) He feels wounded by how it ended, so his intensity toward her has turned into animosity.

Both myself and a friend of mine went through pretty rough breakups at the beginning of this year. We both know how quickly love (or rather, infatuation) can turn into dislike or even hatred. This song played on Spotify radio right while I was in the thick of working through everything that happened. Oftentimes, it’s easier to blame the other person for letting a romantic relationship end. Calnin expresses this – he made the decision to leave, and now he “can’t help but” hate his ex-lover. It perfectly encapsulates all of the feelings someone feels right after a breakup. The heartbreak, followed by detachment, followed by hatred. And finally (hopefully) acceptance of what’s happened.

“White night” is a term for a night that never gets properly dark, hence, a sleepless or fitful night. I’d need all my fingers and toes to count how many sleepless nights I’ve had over a rocky relationship. We’ve all been there. It can feel like a dizzying downward spiral. It could also be a play on “white knight,” which is the chivalrous hero who comes to a woman’s aid. Did Calnin believe that he was his lover’s savior? Was he trying to live into some unseen ideal?

But a white night is a night that doesn’t get completely dark. The sun lingers just below the horizon, waiting to spring up and greet the day. So maybe after all that, there is hope after all.