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Why Hello, Owl City: TAKE TWO
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Hello, again. The unexpected hostility and general negativity as well as the quite predictable snobbery that I have heard directed towards Owl City from ignorant and cynical Gen X singles and their publishers has convicted and convinced me that perhaps I should have interpreted my conversation with Adam Young a bit more for the general public.
So Owl City stirs together a sound yummy enough to make the maddening crowd bounce off the walls: you might expect that Grim Eaters are going to sniff, and necessarily, hipsters are bound to squirm while they wait it out to see whether it’s more damnable to love him or leave him. N.B. Owl City isn’t called Postal Service, Jr.; Adam Young isn’t Incredi-Boy or Michael Cera hooking a date by dork-appeal. Believe it or not, dork-appeal just isn’t that appealing. N.B. Please, whether you are on first-name terms with Ben and Zoe or not, watch your language.
That said, Why Hello, Owl City: TAKE TWO. Is that allowed?
“Meet Adam Young, the 23 year old front-man of a global sensation. Sporting a respectfully black suit, he skips to the front of the stage – yes, he does – and waves awkwardly while tweeny-bopping girls swoon. The cello warms the room and the music surrounds you. Why hello, Owl City, and well well well, hello to you, Adam Young. I think there’s someone you need to meet.
Young has something of the appeal of the vampyric genre: he’s pale but attractive, weak but passionate, he’s really, really talented and he’s, generally, sleepless. So hot right now, as Will Ferrell puts it, but please, disregard the crush appeal of a fad. Adam Young is an intriguing artist and a compelling personality on stage; he not only moves mobs by his sweet turns on the keyboard, but he creates a masterpiece of atmosphere with the twist of a melody.
A very shy person – an extremely shy person, Young doesn’t permit interviews in person, and could probably register as an introvert. “By the common definition,” Young wrote Pollstar, “I am the ‘shyest’ person ever to walk the face of the Earth.” When he vaulted overnight from the basements of Owatonna, Minnesota, to an almost R. Patt status after Owl City caught the roving eyes of Universal Republic by way of a well-aimed EP, it came as a surprise that he enjoyed mastering a stage. Young pours his soul into performance. He is interested in his audience; he plays to gift with music. His concern establishes a remarkable rapport that is entirely missing from most mega shows I have seen. Like an oyster on the stove, Young opens himself on the stage when he would shut tightly vis a vis.
Doubtless, it helps that Young’s close friend Breanne is dazzling her brunette smile behind the keyboard and harmonizing in Skittle colors. Their camaraderie eases an auditorium into a house-show atmosphere. “Adam is a happy clam,” Young exclaimed in an email to Stereopathic, and shared that he is inspired by the example of Jonathan Ford of Unwed Sailor, a musician noted for his ability to create a scene with only the voices of instruments as well as his penchant to man the band with a crew of friends. “Genius,” Young calls Ford with an e-sigh of admiration.
“I see warm motorcycles and giant polar crust devils with venomous, wet sucking lips when I sing,” Young confided to Stereopathic, a claim that gains credibility when registered with this fact that Young is an insomniac as well as an introvert, a clause that places him among a percentage of people who are 2.5 times more likely to suffer from depression and commit suicide than those who enjoy a healthy average amount of sleep. It’s true. “I can’t sleep unless I take sleeping pills,” he wrote to me, waxing eloquent, “I’ve been awake for 52 hours before.” It’s little wonder than an ideal day in Seattle would find Young “in bed,” as he said in his email, and that in a perfectly proper way, nor is it that his music swings dizzyingly into moody flights of exhilaration while expressing a ubiquitous craving for sleep. After 52 hours of wide-eyed exhaustion, an avalanche of strawberries isn’t a punk Care Bears fantasy and it certainly isn’t cause to bat an eyelash – the miracle is that Young’s sky rains stars and not razors, and that we actually would like to be in one of Adam Young’s dreamscapes.
Young sings atmospheres into being. His favorite thing about his home in Owatonna, MN, he writes, waxing eloquent, is its “hard, irony water. It makes your hair feel like a stiff helmet after you take a shower.” Young is inspired by Greenland, by Iceland, by Antarctica, by Australia. His innovation is his ability to write beautiful songs that transport you to this place of happiness through witty perception and yet still don’t deserve to be on the next Disney hit soundtrack.
The songs of Owl City are the poetry of 2 a.m, half-hallucinated pictures of a world asleep and dreaming odd and surprisingly optimistic avalanches of thoughts. It is certainly more common for a good, a really good artist to crush your heart like his was and most mature listeners can empathize sooner with this and with disillusion or chronic unfulfillment than with metrical or emotional buoyancy, but that doesn’t make it misplaced for Young to sense a brighter horizon. Pour me a heavy dose of atmosphere – I like to feel the stars explode around me.
For those wondering, I seriously doubt that Young sparkles in the sunlight, but I forgot to ask.
Molly Miltenberger is a freelance writer with an interest in postcards and goldfish, and, incidentally, a love for owls and similar mollusks. Molly believes in second chances, and she is really excited that the new Vampire Weekend album is coming out in January.
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5 Responses to “Why Hello, Owl City: TAKE TWO”
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Thanks for the insightful review. I posted my impressions of the Spokane show in the first post below.
I sense a particular bias in the linked Pichfork article. Your work does not carry that bias. On the other hand, the live show really IS better than the CD.
Dale Strom
RAWK
Dale, thank you so much for your comment,and thank you again for hosting a spectacular show!
[...] Charming. Sometimes, the lyrics are poetic and maybe even a bit on the side of the wild Welsh descripts of Dylan Thomas. How’s that? [...]
Great review, Molly! I am not surprised to learn of the inspiration he finds in places like Greenland and Iceland. I have listened to each song on this album anywhere between one and three dozen times since I bought it a couple weeks ago (admittedly a bit behind the curve).
Thanks for the comment Tim, I am happy to know that you are a fellow O C fan!