#and then the harmonies for the second part of that verse are super interesting

[syxnewt]

hey guys I'm super normal and have normal thoughts about things I like a normal amount. Anyway Scylla from epic the musical (song) and the den from slay the princess. Imagine it like an animation

[itwas50yearsagotoday]

11/8/23: It was 50 years ago this month, November 1973, Hall & Oates would release their second album Abandoned Luncheonette. I've heard a couple tracks from their first record, Whole Oats, but not impressed enough to review. This record's a bit different as they have roped in their various styles into a (mostly) blue-eyed Philly Soul sound that would mark most of their late 70s pop hits. The biggest song here is the A.M. classic 'She's Gone'... it failed initially as a single but later when H&O had success with 'Sarah Smile' they re-released it in 1976 and became at top 10 hit. It deserves it too... excellent wistful and emotional song about lost love and regrets. It has a very urban sound too, which really works when you're walking around a big city (a great listen on The Drive when walking around Chicago). The other song on this record that I like equally as much is the title track. Spotify indicates that this song is one of the lesser tunes listened to on the record, and that's a shame because it's a really cool song. Yeah, the lyrics are kinda banal, trying to be deep, but what makes the song is the chorus... vastly different than the slow, quieter verses, the 'month to month, day to day, year to year' part of the chorus is damn near majestic, with fake strings (I thought it might be Paul Buckmaster) played on a mellotron... goosebumps, man! The rest of the songs on this record are okay, nothing offensive... it is interesting how much Oates does lead vocals on almost half of the songs, my favorite being 'I'm Just a Kid (Don't Make Me Feel Like a Man)'; later, on the big hits it seems, Oates is only the harmony to Hall's lead. Since I won't get to it with this blog (or at least the 50 years part) note that H&O would reach super-stardom in the early 1980s with the advent of MTV and videos accompanying their more New Wave-style singles. They were a duo to have nostalgia for in an ironic way in the 2000s, but now I consider their songs to be entrenched in my rotation probably forever.

[you-turn-it-into-light]

H-el-ical// - Kaihouku (解放区) (2022) Album Review

Sorry I’m a bit late to the party, I was busy and waiting for the physical album to arrive. I’ve given it one listen so my thoughts might not be super coherent but I’ll also give some updated thoughts on the songs that reappear in the track list.

Overall Thoughts:

The promo image made me think that we’d see a larger picture of Hikaru, there’d be more of that paint and we’d see the full outfit, so I’m a little disappointed with the cover art especially the regular edition.

No extra booklet coming with the limited edition is disappointing as well

While I enjoy that Hikaru branched out with composers more, I wish she kept writing more of the lyrics. I like it when artists write their own lyrics because it feels more like their song and Hikaru’s lyrics added a lot of character and a feeling of connection with her through the songs. I hope she doesn’t go down the route of continuing to only let people write lyrics for her songs.

I’m a bit let down by the new songs, I only love one of them lol.

I like the new route she’s taking, most of these songs sound different that stuff she’s done before and it’s a nice break from the samey stuff from her last few mini albums. Even though I’m sad there weren’t more dark or epic songs in this album, it’s really just my personal preference.

Altern-ate- (7/10)

This song is interesting in some ways, I really like the verses and the bridge especially. The arrangement is quite epic and I love the choir in the beginning and the strings section near the end. I like how the lyrics incorporate both lines from within the anime with 「二人で一つ」(the two of us become one) and 「この物語の集約じゃない」(I am not the protagonist of this story) as well as the actual Gleipnir norse mythology. Hikaru really did but a lot of effort into these lyrics and they’re so interesting. The main strings riff however is a little boring and the chorus is also quite bland. There are also a couple of moments in the studio recording that I go ‘okay Hikaru you didn’t want to do a second take?’ like the ‘nazo wa tokenai mama’ and parts where she was obviously straining her voice but at this point I expect this is every Hikaru song.

Rasen no Mayu (螺旋の繭) (6.5/10)

I don’t mind this song, it sends like a very generic pop-rock song. I like Hikaru’s low notes in the verses and the chorus is growing on me with each listen to be honest. The subtle additions of two harmonies is a nice touch but the chorus is honestly my favourite part. The instrumentation and arrangement is honestly kind of generic and forgettable, nothing much to say about it. I like the song fine but it’s probably the most forgettable out of all the new songs.

The Sacred Torch (4/10)

This song is just kind of... okay? I don’t mind the verses and I like the urgency of the the pre-choruses but the chorus is boring and bland. The flavour of this song isn’t really my thing and it’s definitely my least favourite A-Side in all of H-el-ical//’s single’s thus far. The final 「灯かかげ」 sounds cool but Hikaru sounds very strained in that part as well. Also why do the strings sound midi? Can they not afford actual strings?

Ambient Border (6/10)

Are those midi strings again? Ugh. I love dramatic songs in musicals and this definitely gives me that vibe. The verses are boring but I like the chorus and especially the bridge (mostly the line ノイズと残響酸性雨の中で錆び付いた) it’s very dramatic and feels like it could be in the climax of a story. Similar to Rasen no Mayu, the instrumentation and arrangement is nothing to write home about and neither is the song really. I feel like I’ll enjoy it more if I hear it in the context of the musical.

YES NO (イエスノウ) (8/10)

This song is so 80′s it’s so great. The combination of electronic sounds and the guitar phrases are very funky and I love the sound. The chorus is great but the bridge is so sexy, definitely my favourite part. Hikaru’s low notes in time with the bass and cowbell in the background and then the guitar comes back in? Sounds great. The piano solo was also great. This is a great song to dance to and it’s one of the sexiest things Hikaru’s ever sung. I have this song’s rating as an 8 because while there are lots of things I like about this song, I don’t think there’s there’s anything I LOVE about it.

Kanashii Kedamono (カナシイケダモノ) (9/10)

My favourite song in the album. The guitar riff and chill vibe caught me immediately then Hikaru’s singing in the pre-chorus successfully got me in. It sounds similar to YES NO but I feel like it’s more dramatic. The bridge though??? The melody is so good, and the arrangement and instrumentation of the lines 「震えるまま　ありのままの」 is so dramatic I love it. The arrangement isn’t anything super interesting, but I like the guitar in the verses and the horns in the chorus, none of it sounds midi so I love it. The last chorus is especially great. Definitely my favourite.

Kawaisou da yo (かわいそうだよ) (7/10)

Hikaru’s singing in this song is mostly great, she conveys a lot of emotion in the lyrics, especially the line 「I hate youでも逢いたくて」sounds very raw. The breathy way she sings in most of the song makes the final chorus with its key change more impactful in my opinion. The arrangement is nothing to write home but I like the sound of the shirt it was very nice. The lyrics are nice as well, they’re more raw than anything else Hikaru’s sung and it’s a nice change. I really wanted to love this song but it just reminds me of too many other generic J-Pop ballads (in my opinion) that I can’t fall in love with it. It’s one of those songs that I only like because Hikaru’s singing it I guess.

disclose (8/10)

I remember I fell in love with this song the first time I heard this song, it was what I always wanted in a Hikaru solo song and it’s still really great. The arrangement is interesting and dramatic, I love how Gushimiyagi contrasts the arrangements between the verses. The instrumentation in this song is heavy and impactful and the addition of sound effects and occasional midi choir in the background really adds to the effect. Hikaru’s singing is very strained in the chorus but I think it adds to the desperate feeling the song is going for. Similar to other songs Gushimiyagi has composed, the chorus is my least favourite part. Repeating the same two notes over and over again isn’t really interesting to me. But overall, love this song.

clea-rly- (7.5/10)

I still love the heavy rock feeling of this song, it suits Hikaru very well. I love the arrangement of this song it’s so cool and the added electronic elements add rather than detract from the arrangement. Again though, the verses and pre-chorus are the best parts (except for the bridge cause the way Hikaru sings 「感覚を味わいたくない？」is soooo sexy) and the chorus is just boring because it’s just the same phrase over and over again like STOP. I like the idea of Altern-ate-’s single songs being from the perspectives of the main protagonist even though I hated the show. Anyway, This song is a lot of fun and I really like it, even if it can sound a bit basic.

JUST DO IT (4/10)

I actually like the chorus the best in this song, it sounds more dramatic and less cheesy than the rest of the song (even if it’s a bit repetitive). I guess I’m against the very premise of this song because I’ve heard what the anime’s about and it’s so stupid lmao. The rest of the song isn’t really my cup of tea, the technological electronic sounds fit the tone of the show but I don’t really like them. The english parts of the intro and outro are so cheesy I can’t handle them. Overall, IMPOSSIBLE LOVE is better go listen to that.

landscape (5.5/10)

I like the verses of the song, the guitar phrases are really calming and give a very atmosphere to the song, the strings in the second verse are also lovely. I don’t mind the electronic elements of the song but the chorus isn’t really my thing. I like how experimental and layered this song is, but it’s interesting but also boring at the same time. If they entire song was like the verses I would probably like the song them a lot more.

pulsation (English ver.) (5/10)

The only real thing to talk about with this version is the lyrics and some of the new arrangement choices I guess. I don’t mind the English lyrics, but the way Hikaru chose to space the syllables in the line of ‘The sky is so blue’ always bothers me, like why did you decide to speed ‘the sky’ together then extend ‘sky’ when you could just sing ‘the sky is’ evenly, like it fits... Also the way ‘anymore now’ is extended is so strange and kind of interrupts the flow of the song in my opinion. The arrangement changes are interesting if a little overwhelming and obnoxious (in the case of the bridge). This version is a nice alternative, but I prefer the original.

Favourite Songs: Kanashii Kedamono, YES NO, disclose

Least Favourite Songs: JUST DO IT, The Sacred Torch, landscape (not including pulsation (English ver.))

[the-world-is-treating-me-bad]

Thoughts and First Impressions on the Beatles Discography: With The Beatles

It has been some time, but welcome back to: "Misery listens to Beatles albums on repeat for a really long time and then gives his opinions on them"! This listening episode was With The Beatles!

Compared to when i listened to Please Please Me, I've had this one on repeat for a lot longer, and idk if that's me liking it more or if I just needed more time to formulate my opinions lol

It Won't Be Long: Starting the album off with a bang! Love the guitar riffs. Also the little background "yeah!"s are charming. Love the backing vocals on this in general. Got a good groove to it altogether. I like how it's more intense instrumentally on the chorus and then pulls back on the verse, it's a good ebb and flow. Also like that oooo harmony at the end.

All I've Got To Do: LOVE this one! I love how sparse the instrumentation is at points so that part of the song is also just the silence. Vocals are lovely. Really like the solid light drumming on the verse. The hum over the instrumental into the fadeout is gorgeous.

All My Loving: It's this one! I'd heard this one before when I watched AHDN. Harmonies are nice. It's got a good consistent groove to it. The bit where it pulls back and it's vocals with the "Ooo"s is really lovely.

Don't Bother Me: George song!!!!! Made me laugh that his first released song was just "leave me alone", very George of him. Claves are fun! The tambourine is cute. Guitar is groovy. Good vibes good vibes. Melody is nice. Unique in just having lead vocals. The tom on the fadeout is cool!

Little Child: HARMONICA!!!!! SHE'S BACK! This one is fun and groovy. Very dancey. The yelling and then going ham on the harmonica makes me smile.

Till There Was You: Beautiful Beautiful Beautiful!!!! I said "oh Paul..." with a dreamy grin on my face the first time i listened to this. HOWEVER my brain is meme poisoned and when he sang "I never saur them winging" my brain just played the tiktok H2O just add water "aur naur cleo the condensation" audio and i did start laughing. HOWEVER HOWEVER this is genuinely gorgeous and i love the guitars and the bongos and Paul's voice. Beautiful Gorgeous, and one I'd listen to on repeat alone. Probably my favourite track.

Please Mister Postman: Tiktok also poisoned my brain for this one a bit but it's really fun! I love the "wait a minute"s, they're good vibes. I was bobbing my head. Just really nice. Good vocals all around. the bit where it's just John singing and the handclaps and the drums? Gorgeous.

Roll Over Beethoven: The stereo mix... was not made for men like me... I did not enjoy having handclaps every second blasted into my right ear, I'm not gonna lie. Otherwise it's very good technically instrumentally, George did very good on the vocals and I like his little "woo"s and the way that he pronounces Tchaikovsky. Good vibes if not for the goddamn handclaps.

Hold Me Tight: Ohhhh the vibes are fantastic. I love Paul's voice so much, I really do. Vocals in general are fab. Guitar is fun and good. Another very danceable one.

You Really Got A Hold On Me: Good slow groove! I like the drums, with the sus cymbal. Also the "hold me"s are lovely. Nice high notes! Piano is good.

I Wanna Be Your Man: RINGO TIME BAYBEE!!!!! Just a fun good time. The guitar is great! Apparently there's organ on this? I can't super hear it individually, but I can feel it supporting the other instruments, and the glissando is audible. I actually fucking love how (so far) Ringo's songs just devolve into him screaming. Fantastic. Good Vibes. Ringo I Love You.

Devil In Her Heart: Groovy! I like the maracas. The backing vocals are lovely. Good drum groove. The bass is actually audible in the mix for once! Guitar is nice, and I like the closing chord.

Not A Second Time: Piano!!! I love how percussive it is. Great. It's interesting to hear the other instruments take more of a backseat in the mix.

Money (That's What I Want): More groovy piano! Enjoy how for the second album in a row we have John closing it out and just YELLING. I would also like some money! Again with the sparser instrumentation leaving the vocals a bit more isolated. John Lennon Yells At You To Give Him Money ASMR.

Aaaaand that's the album! Gave similar vibes to Please Please Me tbh, and I know this one was about a third covers as well. I really liked it though, it was a good listen. Idk if this is just something i noticed in this album because i was listening more, so it might be a thing with PPM as well, but the bass was really quiet in the mix. Anyways, yeah! My Opinions! Onto the next set of non-album singles, and then AHDN! As always if you like my opinions feel free to follow or chat!

[findingmypeace]

7/10/2022

I will make a post on here but it’s going to be about something I normally don’t talk about on here. My blog is usually about my mental health rather than my hobbies. There is one interest that when I talk about it people tell me my face lights up.

Way back when I was 10yrs old I joined a choir. It instantly became something I was passionate about. I continued to sing in choirs until my late 20′s. I never missed a year. Around that time I had gotten pretty burned out. I was tired of attending rehearsals. I would say what contributed most to my sense of burnout was my depression. I wanted to stay at home and do nothing rather than go to rehearsal.

Well, here we are 12-13 yrs later and I’m looking to join a community choir. I just can’t seem to find one that works with my schedule. Of the two choirs that I know of one doesn’t exist anymore and the other has rehearsals at the same time I have a staff meeting for work. So I am continuing to explore my options.

So this is where I’m going to geek out on my love for music. This is where it becomes obvious that it is something I’m passionate about.

This will be me really showing my age. My high school years were late 90′s, early 2000′s. I graduated high school class of 2001. My freshman year of high school a new boy band made their debut. Backstreet Boys. I was never a ultra fanatic but I liked their music. My sophomore year a song came out called “I want it that way”. At the time I loved that song. My junior year of high school of high school my school had a men’s show choir, women’s show choir, and then we would come together for a concert choir. The men’s show choir sang “I want it that way”. All this to say that song has sentimental memories.

It may have become a super cheesy song that people joke about but recently I started listening to it again. Again, this is where I’m going to geek out. Music is so special. There is so much to this song that everyone overlooks because it’s the small details. I LOVE when the harmony is the higher notes rather than the lower notes. I sang 1st Soprano the entire time I was in choir. 1st Soprano usually has the melody. Very rarely do we have the harmony. But this song, in certain places, has the upper range as the harmony. Also, I think when I start singing in a choir again I think might try singing 2nd Soprano. My voice is naturally in the upper range so I don’t think I could sing alto but I would love to try singing the harmony for a change and 2nd Soprano is usually part of that. It might be hard to sing 2nd Soprano because it’s not the melody and my brain automatically goes to the melody because that’s what I’ve done my whole life. But I’m up for the challenge.

Back to “I want it that way”. Another part of the song I really like is how they form the words to the song. The sound of each word can be different depending on the way you form your mouth to project the word. The way the Backstreet Boys form their words is beautful! I love the way it sounds. (Again, I know it’s a cheesy song. I don’t care!) And there are other things I like about the song that are just because I like how it sounds (ie: the instruments they use and the way it goes from note to note).

To be completely honest I think of a lot of pop songs like this. There’s a part in a Demi Lovato song (Give your heart a break-the second verse) where there is a piano playing in the background. It’s the only part in the whole song that has that and it sounds so beautiful.

So as you can see music is something I’m very passionate about. I like the little details. I can’t wait until I can start singing again. I didn’t even think about joining a choir until LS suggested last summer. She’s known me long enough to know this is a part of who I am. I really hope I can find a local choir that fits my schedule.

[idontwanttospoiltheparty]

hey! would you like to talk about your favourite songs off of each album of the beatles? i’m always curious to know what are the elements that “attract” someone to a particular song!!

Yes I would love to, anon!!!!

My favourite on Please Please Me is Please Please Me: I just think think it's really fun, find those chords in the short breakdown mid-verse very cool and the "cOME ON" is infectious! Also the rhyming in the bridge section is so fun, love rhymes that incorporate multiple words like complainin' / rain in. Do You Want To Know A Secret? has also been growing on me recently just cause it's so melodically strange, it's kind of entrancing.

For With The Beatles, my faves are Till There Was You and You Really Got A Hold On Me cause I think they're each one of the respective's lead-singers best performances, plus the guitar solo on TTWY and the backing vocals on YRGAHOM are to die for!! And if you want to know my favourite original on WTB then it's definitely All My Loving – kind of basic but it's just that great of a song. The perfect melody, really. The stop-and-gos, the walkdown basslines, the diminished chords in the middle eight. MUAH!

sidenote: I use "bridge" if the song has a clearly differentiable verse and chorus + a third part (the bridge) and I use "middle eight" for the non-main part when there are only two distinct sung parts.

On A Hard Day's Night, my favourite song is I Should Have Known Better, cause it's infectious and the middle eight going into minor just sounds so good.

On Beatles For Sale my fave is I Don't Want To Spoil The Party – my URL of course :) I think one think that originally attracted me to it is that it sounds like a Taylor song content-wise (not really music-wise but hey, country pals stick together!). I love the melody during the "I wonder what went wrong / I've waited far too long" bit and the way he and Paul trade off lead harmonies going into the middle eight is so lovely.

On Help! it's actually pretty hard to pick a favourite. Probably Help! because it's a banger and I love the backing vocals but I'm also very partial to You've Got To Hide Your Love Away and I Need You and Ticket To Ride. YGTHYLA just has SUCH a good chorus melody and George echoing it is *chef's kiss*. I Need You is just such a sweet little song and Ticket To Ride is so harmonically and structurally interesting. Love how Paul comes in and out with his backing vocals, love how long the song lingers on the A major chord only to resolve it in a super unexpected way.

On Rubber Soul (my FAVE!!!!!!) my favourite You Won't See Me because just ---- everything about it works for me. I love angry yet upbeat breakup(ish) songs, I love the uber-60s atmosphere of the song, I love the bassline and I love when John steals the attention with his "No I wouldn't, No I wouldn't" at the end of the middle eight. But Since I love Rubber Soul I'd like to mention that Norwegian Wood, Nowhere Man, Michelle and In My Life (yes, I've converted, keep your pants on) are all incredible songs! NW is just hypnotic with its story and the sitar is just perfect; NM again, BASSLINE, and the harmonizing!!! I also really like how John sings on it; Michelle is one of the most gorgeous pieces of music I've ever heard; IML has clawed its way up for me after spending like MONTHS thinking about what the song truly means. Also I'm a sucker for using a minor fourth chord (as opposed to a major fourth chord) while playing in major!!!!

Revolver, my absolute favourite Beatles song is Eleanor Rigby because it tells the story it's trying to tell perfectly with exactly the right amount of words and the melody is rather lovely. But I still must mention I'm Only Sleeping which is my second-favourite Beatles song cause it just sounds absolutely great, start to finish. John weaves between major and minor so seemlessly and every melody in this song is perfect. The lyrics are charming beyond belief and the reverse guitar solo sounds amazing.

Sgt. Pepper: my fave is probably She's Leaving Home. I LOVE the dueting bit and I think it tells a story really well. Also obligatory shoutout to A Day In The Life, insane song. Ringo's fills on that!!!! The Ahhhs!!!! They transition so PERFECTLY back into the "I read the news today" melody, I want to eat grass.

On Magical Mystery Tour my fave is The Fool On The Hill mostly cause I just looooove those switches between the chirpy major of the verses and the dark minor of the chorus. It carries so much meaning on its own, the production of that song perfectly matches its content. MUAH!

For the White Album my favourite is While My Guitar Gently Weeps: probably George's best lyrics but also THE PIANO INTRO!!!!! THE BASS IN THE MIDDLE EIGHT!!! Also the switching from minor to major, actually in the exact same way Paul does in The Fool On The Hill only reversed. Love it!

On Yellow Submarine it's Hey Bulldog but basically by default :| I don't give this song much thought, I do like the piano lick though.

On Abbey Road my favourite is Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight: literally like PEAK PAUL. One of his most gorgeous melodies, one of his most poignant lyrics and basically my fave vocal performance of his!!!! The string arrangement in Golden Slumbers literally sounds like the violins are trying to comfort him. It's just lovely.

I'm not entirely sure what my favourite on Let It Be is tbh I don't like Let It Be much oops. In theory the best song is cleary Across The Universe but all the recordings are shit so ....! Get Back but the Love album version lmao that packs a better punch. Although the 2021 Mix was an improvement.

[lovelylogans]

debutante

previous chapter / chapter three / next chapter

part of the wyliwf verse.

warnings: mentions of transphobia, food mentions, alcohol, kissing, someone makes an approach as if they’re going to start a fistfight but they do not, please let me know if i’ve missed anything else!

pairings: logince, moxiety

words: 15,031

notes: the spanish is from an online translator, so if it’s terribly wrong, please let me know! also, the emails in this are fake, please don’t try to email them, pretty sure they don’t exist lol. also the wine advice is from my general family's ideas about the value of wine, but the pretentious way you're meant to drink wine was taught to me when i was in italy by some other students who went to sommelier class, a few days before i posted the first chapter of wyliwf, so

⁂

patton’s lingering over one last (decaf, darn virgil) mug of cocoa/coffee when the bell over the door jangles. 

patton turns to glance over his shoulder and automatically brightens when he sees that it’s logan.

“hey!” he says eagerly. “i hope everything at the slange’s went okay, and even if it didn’t, i have masterfully wrangled virgil into allowing you to select a sweet treat of your choosing, or we can stop by lucy’s, if you want, and—oh!”

because logan had made a beeline straight for the counter, and has wrapped his arms around patton, burying his face in his shoulder.

“oh,” patton says softly, because—because logan’s not much of a hugger, and if he’s hugging him now... 

patton immediately wraps his arms around logan in kind, rubbing a hand up and down his back as he does so. logan’s taller than him—patton distantly wonders if that will ever not be strange to him—and so he has to duck his chin to place his face into the space between patton’s neck and shoulder. patton squeezes tighter, and logan shivers a little bit.

“oh, hey, buddy, are you okay?”

logan nods, but he doesn’t say anything, lingering with his face pressed into patton’s sweater for a couple seconds, taking a couple deep breaths, shoulders relaxing slowly, oh so painstakingly slowly, before he emerges, looking slightly embarrassed, in a way that feels distinctly teenager-y.

“sorry.”

“you don’t gotta apologize for hugging me, kiddo,” patton says, frowning, reaching out to cup logan’s cheek. “is everything okay?”

“yeah,” he says. “just—” and he awkwardly reaches out to poke patton’s shoulder. “y’know. you’re my dad.”

“well, yeah,” patton says, still a little confused. “super thrilled i’m your dad, lo, have been for sixteen years and—how many days has it been since your birthday?”

logan’s lips twitch up into a little smile, and he settles into the chair next to him.

“d’you wanna talk about it?” patton says.

logan shakes his head, and he says very quietly, “not here.”

patton nods, absorbing this, but before he can say anything else, virgil comes out from the kitchen, rag and spray bottle in hand, ready to wipe down the counter.

“oh, hey, you’re back!” virgil says. “uh, your dad’s been taking decaf most of the night in order to get you a sweet, if you want one, even though nutrition doesn’t work like it’s split across two people—”

“can i get a brownie?” logan asks. “no offense, virgil, i just—kind of want to get home.”

“that’s cool,” virgil says, not at all offended. “one brownie, to go, comin’ right up.”

and so virgil plucks a brownie from the pastry case with a pair of tongs, setting it in a wax paper bag, before sealing that inside of a virgil’s diner to-go bag, passing it across the counter. “see you tomorrow for breakfast?”

“breakfast,” patton confirms, and leans forward, cheerfully demanding “kiss!”

virgil obligingly leans forward the rest of the way, giving patton a quick peck. patton passes over enough money to cover his meal and a tip, before he gently taps logan on the shoulder. 

“let’s go, then, the couch is calling my name,” patton says, like he isn’t even a little worried about what could have prodded logan into hugging him out of the blue.

they step out into the night, the bell jangling in harmony with virgil’s goodbye. patton tucks himself a little more snugly into his jacket—spring may be approaching, but winter wasn’t letting go without a fight, so he was stuck with steel-gray cold mornings and too-early sunsets for a while longer—looking over to logan, who’s backlit by the street lamps and the fairy lights dotting a few of the buildings around town. 

his face doesn’t give anything away. it almost never does, but patton studies his face anyways; stiff and unyielding, eyes sharp and looking out for any oncoming traffic. patton wishes a little bit that logan’s face would at least give him a little hint as to what happened at the slange’s, but logan just looks like he normally does, if a little stressed, and that could be for any number of reasons—school, or tiny bureaucratic roadblocks for the debutante ball, or a fight with dee, or just something to do with dee in general.

either way, patton jerks his head in the usual direction they walk to get home, and logan nods, falling into step beside him, the pair of them mirroring each other’s posture; hands in coat pockets, faces ducked to shield from any stray gusts of wind, their pace the same, the way it only ever is when you’re very used to walking to the same places with the same person.

they walk in silence for a couple minutes before logan takes a deep breath.

“can i ask you a morality question?”

patton smiles, just a little—journalistic morality and ethics questions are always interesting conversations with logan, as patton’s innate moral compass works well with logan’s encyclopedic knowledge of the history of journalism, so they tend to spend almost hours talking about stuff like this, hypothetical situations they can puzzle over together. plus, it’s a nice little insight into something logan’s so passionate about; it’s something they can do together that increases patton’s appreciation for logan’s talent.

“‘course you can!”

logan chews at the inside of his cheek for a few seconds, getting his question in order, before he says, “let’s say i’m interviewing someone. a peer.”

“yes.”

“and, not due to any prodding from said peer, i come into knowledge of something from… that peer’s family.”

ah. okay. so this might not be a hypothetical question.

“yes,” patton says cautiously.

“and if a previously established… editor,” logan says, edging carefully around it. “already knows sensitive information about said peer that was previously, ah. decided against publishing. if the reporter wished to ask advice, should they ask the editor, or keep said knowledge to themselves?”

patton rolls the question around in his head, removing the hypothetical-ness of it all. so, if patton knows sensitive information about dee that he’s already keeping secret, and if logan found out something else, then is it okay for logan to tell patton about it?

if patton knows one thing about dee, it’s that he’s secretive. the fact that dee has secrets isn’t surprising. the part that’s surprising him is that logan feels the need to get his dad’s opinion on the secret. so that probably means it’s a pretty serious secret—logan’s a smart kid, he knows what to do in a lot of situations, so if he feels like he needs patton’s help...

“well,” he says cautiously. “um. i guess it depends on the knowledge itself. is it going to hurt d—um, the peer, if no one knows? is it something that puts them in danger?”

“...no,” logan says. “i—ah, the reporter doesn’t think it will put the peer in physical danger.”

patton frowns. “so it would be more of an emotional distress situation.”

“yes,” logan says, relieved. “yes, exactly. it would put the peer in emotional distress. it causes the peer emotional distress.”

“currently?” patton says, frowning deeper.

“yes.”

“is the peer alone in knowing this? do they have other people to talk to about this in their personal life, not just the reporter and their editor?”

“technically,” logan says and frowns. “the peer and their family… employs people. so, the staff are aware of the situation, but they aren’t—friends.”

“the peer’s family?” patton says, glancing. “is that an option, for them to talk to their family?”

logan’s face deepens into a scowl. “it seems like that is not an option, given the information that the reporter has learned about the peer’s family.”

patton sighs, because, well. he probably should have expected that. dee’s dad was never particularly kind, but. he’d been hoping things like marriage and fatherhood might have changed him.

“um,” logan says, and gives patton a sidelong glance. “i thought a potential solution could be… offering the peer a space to come in and sl—um. interview. in the presence of the editor who already knows things. because the reporter feels out of their depth, but—but maybe the peer will decide to discuss things with the editor, who seems to have more expertise in this… area.”

the sleepover text, patton realizes. logan bringing dee over doesn’t just mean more planning, or an easy place for dee to stay after Get Cultured day; it’ll mean that patton will be there, too, and if they all get to talking, like last time, and dee lets something slip, like last time, or (more preferably to patton) if dee decides that patton seems like an adult he can trust with information, if patton seems like an adult who can give out sound advice...

“that seems like a great choice for the reporter to have made,” patton says, smiling at logan. “not divulging any confidences, but offering a way for the peer to decide if they want further support or not. agreed. that was a good moral exercise.” 

logan nods. “on a completely unrelated note, i texted you earlier—”

“oh, yeah, totally unrelated,” patton agrees, winking. “but—yeah, that sounds good to me! totally down for that, it’s been a while since you’ve had a slumber party. have you already asked dee over?”

“no, not yet,” logan says, and that line of conversation has carried them to the front door of their house, where patton steps ahead of logan to unlock the door and let him in, flicking on the light as logan divests himself of his backpack and his jacket.

“well, you can go ahead and do that, i may as well mention now that you don’t need to get some gloves, i ordered some,” patton says, “so we can cross that off the list. um, your escort—what’s her name again?”

“poppy,” logan says.

“right, poppy,” patton says. “one, do you know if she’s coming to Get Cultured day, and two, does she have a tux?”

“i’ll text her and ask,” logan says. simultaneously, they collapse on the couch. logan makes no move to text her. instead, he frees his brownie from virgil’s, breaks it in half, and hands one half to patton. patton, grinning, accepts it.

“so,” patton says, taking a bite of the brownie. “how was the slange’s house, anyway?”

logan turns wide, beleaguered eyes to patton. “rich people are ridiculous.”

patton snorts and tucks his legs up underneath him, propping his head on his hand. “tell me about it.”

⁂

dee’s eyebrows arch at him as logan opens up his lunchbox. logan’s had his lunchbox for a few years, so it’s not quite as pristine as it was when he first bought it, after a lot of time spent in backpacks with heavy textbooks, and dropped on the ground, and shoved into lockers, but logan still likes the design of it—it’s black, with white sketchings of chemical formulas.

logan glances at his ziplocked jam sandwich and back up at dee. “what?”

“i don’t know how you can eat the same thing every day,” dee says.

“just for lunch,” logan says, removing a clementine. “and the fruits and vegetables change seasonally. dessert depends on what grocery store sales are on. what do you have for lunch, anyway?”

dee, wordlessly, proceeds to remove a gold-foil-wrapped something from his lunchbox, a black yeti-branded one, and logan eyes it.

“that’s excessive,” he tells dee.

dee shrugs. “yellow and gold are my favorite colors. shortly followed by black.”

“what, not brown?” logan says, eyeing his cape. “also, do you have a special understanding to flout uniform rules? ted grayson got pink-slipped because he wasn’t wearing a jacket or a sweater, how do you get away with—” he gestures vaguely to the bowler hat, the cape, the yellow gloves.

dee’s smile flits across his face so fast that logan thinks he might have imagined it, before he pulls out his phone.

“if you ever come to my parents’ house, i’ll show you my pink slip collection,” dee says decisively. he hands over the phone to logan, and logan obligingly looks.

it’s a wall full of filled-out pink slips.

“it’s the most precious art piece i own,” dee says in an officious tone, taking his phone back.

“how have you not been expelled,” logan breathes out disbelievingly.

dee’s smile is much less fleeting, this time, and he says, “anyways, speaking of clothes. you know a tailor, right? i need one for the ball.”

“well, tailor,” logan says with a shrug, beginning to peel his clementine. “it’s just virgil, but i could ask him. he’s doing a lot of dresses for sideshire high kids, is yours very complicated in terms of alterations?”

dee looks at him, before he says in a measured tone, “it fits perfectly fine, i just think the fabric at the shoulders needs reinforcing.”

logan blinks at him. “the shoulders?”

dee stares at him, for a few seconds, before he says in a purposefully casual tone, “yes, i had to look at a binder full of designs and i thought this one would be the best, what with the binder and all, but it turns out it needs a little bit of cover. some of the lace at the shoulder’s torn already, i need to make sure that’s hidden.”

logan promptly feels like an idiot—dee would need alterations to ensure that his secret’s kept, and if he’s wearing a binder and has a lacy shoulder, that would surely show—

“of course,” logan says. “i can ask him later. should i… tell him? about the… shoulder?”

dee chews at his lip for a moment.

“virgil’s my dad’s partner,” logan adds, as a means of explanation as to why he’s the tailor, but also to somehow pass along that virgil is supportive of trans people. “he’s been a bit puzzled by brick’s dress—brick’s nonbinary, they’re a year or so younger than us—but i think virgil’s managed to figure out how to customize the dress to best help brick feel comfortable. that was the biggest alteration, for a while, all the rest of the ones he’s doing are mostly hemming and the like. other than mine. mine used to be my dad’s, and he was quite a bit shorter than me at the time.”

dee chews at his lip a little harder.

“i’d tell only virgil,” logan says, and tacks on hastily, “about the, ah. torn lace at the shoulder. you don’t need to worry about that getting out to anyone else.”

“...i suppose you can,” dee says eventually. “as long as he’s discreet.”

“of course he is,” logan says. “you can let me know if you change your mind, though, i’ll probably tell him after dinner tonight. anyways. if we’re already talking about the debutante ball, shall we go over any of the more recent developments?”

dee nods, and the conversation turns to less fraught topics.

well. perhaps a little bit fraught, because if this blows up in their faces, logan still isn’t entirely sure of what repercussions could face him, but he’s sure there are repercussions.

poppy less casually enters dee and logan’s murmured conversation during lunch about the last touches before Get Cultured Day, and more quite literally shoulders her way in.

“so,” she barks, setting down her lunch tray with a clack, “what are the registration numbers looking like?”

logan looks at dee, and dee shrugs at him, tilting his head ever so slightly so his bowler hat covers his yellow eye, as if to say, you’re her partner, you’re less of a social threat than me, you handle it.

logan turns to poppy, and instead of saying any of that, asks, “aren’t you a freshman? why are you at sophomore lunch?”

she gives him a look, before she says, “so. numbers?”

“it looks like the final number of our participants is at forty-six,” logan says, “barring any last-minute entries, of course.”

poppy looks impressed for a moment, before she says, “i’ve gotten my tux, by the way. what’s your dress like?”

logan pulls up a photograph on his phone—the dress on the mannequin, not on himself—and tells her, “it’s still being altered, but it should be done by the end of the weekend.”

“you have your gloves, your fan, all of it?”

“yes. heels, too.”

poppy nods, and pulls out her planner, ticking talk to logan about dress off her list—logan spots bribery? and namedrop logan to dr. kramschissel and ask opinion on pitch as part of a sub-list underneath it—before she pulls out a manila folder and hands it to him.

“what’re these?” he says.

“design plans, new letterheads, and font families i think we should start using,” she says briskly. “oh, and a few new ways to update the website. that thing hasn’t been updated since before the dot com bubble burst, and we need to stay up-to-date on the latest design trends in the newspaper circle to be able to win a pacemaker, or at the very least continue the all-americans.”

(hey, a definition break from a former staffer here: all-american awards are distributed through the nspa, or the national scholastic press association, and the jea, or journalism education association. an all-american yearbook or newspaper is the highest rating given in critiques; it covers approximately the top five percent of high school and college publications in the entire country. the pacemaker is the highest award a high school publication can receive. these awards are basically high-school versions of pulitzers. and, uh, not to flex, but two-time all-american winner here!)

logan opens the folder, and his eyebrows arch at the infographic example greeting him. it looks incredibly professional, like an image in a magazine, with a color palette pleasing to the eye and simultaneously incredibly simple to read.

“so you’re a designer, then,” logan says; he’s dabbled in adobe photoshop and illustrator, and he knows better than most how long it takes to seem even slightly competent in illustrator, and by the looks of this, poppy is incredibly competent.

“artistic hobbies are proven to improve job performance, ease stress, and can improve memory and cognitive function,” poppy says matter-of-factly. “there’s no front-runner for design editor your senior year, which means there’ll be a gap, and if i prove early now that i know my stuff in design i can get an editor position my junior year. which means i put even more of an impressive resume forward to secure editor in chief my senior year. also, the style guide hasn’t been updated at this school in eight years. i want to write the newest edition.”

“...right,” logan says, and gestures vaguely with the manila folder. “have you shown these to mel?”

“obviously,” she says. “she said i had to wait until i got on staff, but my enthusiasm is apparently very encouraging. anyways, editor-in-chief gets a say in who the other editors are, so i figured i’d submit a portfolio early. also, there are pitches back there. you’ve already had three contribution bylines and i want your opinion on my chances of getting at least one this year.”

she takes the folder from him, flips past a couple pages, before she slides over another infographic, centered with empty boxes for photographs, placeholder text for an article. she’s designed an entire double truck layout. (double trucks are two facing pages in a newspaper; these are usually reserved for photo stories or large events. these are double trucks.)

DEBUTANTE HEADLINE HERE, it screams at the top of the page.

logan’s eyes flick across the table to dee, whose face is entirely blank, even though logan knows that an entire story about the debutante debacle would just draw more attention to what they threw the debutante event to cover.

“you’d have to be interviewed,” poppy says. logan cringes.

“i know, i know, you’re used to being the one who holds the pen,” poppy says. “but—”

“tell you what,” dee cuts in, voice smooth. “i know a way to pitch this to mel that benefits all of us, and won’t require poor logan to have to undergo the interview hell he’s used to submitting others to.”

“hey,” logan says mildly, without any heat.

poppy turns her attention to him, and dee digs out a pen, flipping it smoothly over his fingers.

“may i?” he says, gesturing to the mock-up.

poppy takes it from logan’s hands and passes it to him.

“right,” dee says, and draws a large circle around the infographic, jotting a p beside it, then circling one of the articles (headlined as DRESS SHOPPING PIECE?) and putting l beside it, along with the PARTICIPANT COLUMN, which also gets an l. DEBUTANTE STORY HEADLINE, he circles, and places a d beside it.

“there,” dee says matter-of-factly, capping the pen. “we all get actual bylines, not just contribution ones. logan can write a column and a dress piece, because he knows the person who’s altering sideshire dresses, and i can write the debutante piece, because i’ve been integral to the process, but i’m not as close with the organizers as logan is, which clears him of any bias. he’ll write the column about why the whole thing started. you can get credit for graphics and layout. we’d only need a staffer to take photographs.”

poppy’s eyes dart to him. “you’d think she’d take an entire double-truck by students who aren’t staffers yet?”

dee shrugs, spreading his gloved hands. “the worst she can do is say no. plus—” he slides the paper back, and takes a photograph of it with his phone, tapping a few buttons. “there. now we’ve got proof we came up with it first, and you and i can pitch a fit if they take the idea without involving us.”

“not me?” logan says.

“obviously not,” dee says, “you’re the favorite, which means you’ll be editor-in-chief once you keep that up, and i can benefit from nepotism.”

“i won’t be—”

“okay,” dee says with an eye-roll, “and who else are you going to trust to be your managing editor, louise? please.”

logan hesitates, because, well, he has a point. dee is by far the most capable person in their grade, aside from logan, of course. louise would be best qualified for entertainment editor, or perhaps photo, and then he shakes himself before he starts mentally assigning every proficient journalism student in their grade to editor positions.

“it wouldn’t be nepotism, you’d be qualified,” he says pointlessly.

dee tsks, patting logan’s hand. “of course not. mcmaster, buzz off for a moment, while i finish up this chat with logan, and then i’ll walk you to the journalism lab and help refine your pitch on the way, if you like.”

poppy’s eyes sharpen. “what, pitch it now?”

“no time like the present,” dee says. “and anyways, they’ll probably want a photographer there as we learn all the dances and curtsies this weekend, so—”

“right!” poppy says, “right. i’ll be right back” and she darts off, forgetting her folder, backpack, and lunch entirely.

logan watches her go, and says, resigned, “she really is going to be one of my editors, isn’t she.”

“editor in chief works closest with managing, copy, photo, and design, so she’ll practically be your right hand,” dee says gleefully.

“yours too, if you’re going to be my managing, so don’t look all smug because i will delegate if you make some kind of comment,” logan says, and dee grins at him—an actual, real grin, not a smirk or a smug little smile, a grin, like he’s happy.

and so of course logan has to ruin it by saying, “oh, i’ve been meaning to ask—would you like to come over and spend the night on Get Cultured day?”

the grin vanishes. dee actually looks somewhat alarmed. “what?”

“come over and spend the night,” logan repeats, trying his best to maintain a normal tone even though dee is looking at him as if he’s said come over and we’ll sacrifice you in an attempt to perfectly re-enact aztec ceremonies. “we could make sure everything’s done, then, and you could bring your dress so virgil could alter it and it could go home with in the morning, already done.”

he waits a beat, and when the alarmed look on dee’s face doesn’t abate, he adds, “it could be practice for a work night at the newspaper,” as if that is at all helpful.

“a sleepover?” dee says.

“well, yes,” logan says. 

dee continues to stare.

“you can just say no,” logan says, perhaps a bit snippy, because dee’s acting like logan’s invited him away to get murdered. he is trying to help.

“at your house?”

“yes, at my house,” logan says. 

poppy comes back; she’s managed to pull her hair back into a neat french braid that shows off the sharpness of her cheekbones, the intensity in her eyes. 

“all right, i’m ready for the pitch,” poppy says decisively. “i think we should open with pointing out how this feature wouldn’t exist without you two, but i’m the one who came up with the idea.”

dee ignores her. “are you sure?”

“yes.”

“just you and me,” dee checks, wary.

“well, and my dad, but that’s a given.”

dee absorbs this, still looking rather spooked, before he says decisively, “fine.”

“fine?” logan repeats, arching his eyebrows.

“i mean—yes,” dee says. “yes, i’ll come.”

“all right, then,” logan says. “we can text about details.”

dee clears his throat, and offers his arm for poppy, which she takes with a confused look on her face.

“poppy,” he says, as they’re exiting the cafeteria. “i don’t suppose you’ve been to any slumber parties lately, have you?”

“oh, my mom usually pays me to stay at parties until ten-thirty,” poppy says cheerfully. “she thinks socialization is important and i’m not enough of a people person, so she keeps sending me to parties, so she has to keep paying me, which means i can save up so i apply to the summer science program through mit this summer. mom wants me to stay and do some kind of internship at a beauty company, but how is that going to further my career in cancer research? once i get in she can’t just keep me from going, it’s mit.”

great. his first sleepover, ever, and his only options for in-person advice are the person who invited him to the sleepover and the girl who has her life planned out through her forties likely down to what she’ll eat for lunch every day.

“fantastic,” dee says through gritted teeth.

⁂

From: melissakramschissel@chilton.edu

To: logansanders@chilton.edu; dslange@chilton.edu; poppymcmaster@chilton.edu

CC: laurenpatrikis@chilton.edu

Subject: Debutante Spread

I’ll admit, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten quite so ambitious a pitch from three underclassmen, and never one spearheaded by a freshman. I absolutely love the idea, and if you stumble across a spare ticket for an adult to witness this socially conscious display, please feel free to let me know. I’ve CC’d Lauren Patrikis on this email—she’s a staffer on the Franklin who’s free on Saturday, and she’s very talented with a camera. Feel free to exchange numbers and text about other photography opportunities that you think would help benefit the spread.

Poppy: please put your infographics on a flash drive and drop it off in the lab so we have the highest resolution to upload. Thank you very much for coming up with this idea; I’m all the more excited to have you in class.

Dee: I think that about 1000 words should be the goal for the main piece, but we can discuss length when you come by. After school still works for you, correct?

Logan: Please confirm a time to come and see me so we can discuss the more specific story pitches for the two columns you’re doing.

I very much look forward to what you three get up to in your years in the Chilton journalism program. I have a feeling this is just the beginning of all the unique ideas you’ll have, and I eagerly await the opportunity to edit them.

Best,

Mel Kramschissel, PhD.

 From: logansanders@chilton.edu

To: laurenpatrikis@chilton.edu

CC: dslange@chilton.edu; poppymcmaster@chilton.edu

Subject: Directions for Lessons

Hello,

The directions to the dance studio we’re holding lessons in are attached. Please let me know if you have any further questions about navigating to Sideshire, or about the event in general. I can get you the phone numbers of the teachers, if you’d like them. Would you mind sending me your number, as well?

Regards,

Logan Sanders

 From: logansanders@chilton.edu

To: melissakramschissel@chilton.edu

Subject: Pitch meeting

Hello,

I’d be available during sophomore study hall, if that would work for you? If not, I can stop by after school with Dee.

Regards, 

Logan Sanders

 From: melissakramschissel@chilton.edu

To: logansanders@chilton.edu

Subject: Re: Pitch Meeting

Logan,

I’ve got a feeling that you’re the de facto leader of this little trio, even though the current spread is quite clearly Poppy’s brainchild, and I must say, this is very promising in regards to your future on the paper. I’m sure you’ll do exceptional work with this.

Sophomore study hall works great. You’ll be peeking in on the paper, but I have a feeling you won’t mind that at all. 

Best,

Mel Kramschissel, PhD.

(P.S.—Me pairing Lauren on this project is entirely out of selfish curiosity. Take from that what you will.)

⁂

patton is not sure if he has ever been more awkward eating a cherry danish in his whole life. he supposes that’s a pretty narrow gap to clear, but really, today has blown it out of the water.

most of the time whenever he’s around isadora, he feels like anything he does is dreadfully awkward, so it isn’t like this is news.

they’re together in isadora’s office, a small room just beside the studio; patton had offered to pick up supplies from remy’s café, so he’d brought her a tea and gotten a coffee for himself, and a little tray of assorted pastries. patton had grabbed the danish primarily because it was closest to him, and because isadora had already laid claim to a cruller that she’s been slowly picking at.

he winces a little as isadora takes a sip of her tea, pinky up, more preoccupied with the list in front of her. seriously. he went through years of etiquette training, he knows every fiddly little rule of silverware, he knows the various subconscious messages you can send while selecting a menu for the evening, and yet attempting to eat (or talk, or walk, or do most things) in the presence of isadora’s effortless, intimidating grace, it, well.

patton’s not the most refined person (anymore) but he knows he’s refined enough that he shouldn’t feel so buffoonish in isadora’s presence. he swallows his bite of danish, chasing it quickly with a sip of coffee.

“have you done the viennese waltz before?” he asks, just to break the silence.

“twice,” she says idly, turning the page. “well enough that i can remember the choreography and teach it to the children.”

“oh, good!” patton says. “good, good—um, not that you wouldn’t be able to pick it up really fast if you’d never done it before, since you’re obviously very good at dance being, um, being a dance teacher. and also a professional ballerina! even though i suppose ballerinas don’t really do waltzes, unless it’s, like, the waltz of the flowers or something, so i guess ballerinas do do waltzes! sometimes! what do i know, you know?” and immediately takes another sip of coffee because oh my god, patton, shut UP, he always gets like this whenever he and ms. prince have a one-on-one conversation, she’s so quiet and patton can’t help but word vomit because sometimes the silence gets agonizing.

isadora politely ignores him. patton takes another bite of his cherry danish and chews with fervor, because this way he won’t start blabbering about whatever comes to mind.

“all right,” isadora says at last, closing the handbook. “so, we’ll need to ensure that they know how to do the st. james bow, the viennese waltz, and the circle dance with the fans. that will all be my jurisdiction to lead, with you helping demonstrate, of course.”

“of course,” patton says, nodding like a bobblehead.

“—which means you shall take lead on the proper walk, proper dinner manners, and general courtesy, comportment, and etiquette.”

patton keeps nodding.

isadora takes another sip of tea and says, “so, we have approximately thirty-five kids coming, is that correct?”

“logan’s checking, but some of the chilton kids are being sent to other prep courses by their parents,” patton says, and frowns. “so—maybe a little less than that number, really. i can text him, if you want? i should text him—”

“that’s acceptable,” she says, waving him off. “he’ll be home from school soon enough, we can ask then.”

patton freezes, phone already in hand, before meekly puts it aside. 

“i think we should begin as one big group,” isadora says, “and demonstrate the bows and curtsies, then we can split off into groups to cover the fans and the walk…”

and so patton mostly just listens and takes notes—he does not want to forget any part of this process—on how isadora thinks the teaching should be done. honestly, it’s a miracle she agreed to do it when roman pitched it to her, because one, she’s a teacher and he has basically no experience in teaching teenagers other than his own very curious kid, two, the studio is basically the only space big enough to hold all of them at once, and three, isadora has come up with a way to do this in such an organized way that’s almost militaristic. he’s very grateful that she’s agreed to this, and he tells her so once she’s finished informing him of the general outline she’s come up with for Get Cultured Day.

she nods in acknowledgement and says, “well, roman’s quite excited about the whole ordeal.”

patton grins at her. “i heard about their date—sounds like his dress is a definite statement piece.”

isadora huffs softly, shaking her head; she hasn’t yet put her hair up in a severe bun for her afternoon lessons, like she almost always does, though she’s in a pair of stretchy leggings and a loose sweatshirt that tumbles down to her mid-thighs. her hair’s in a ponytail, with a few black strands framing her face. it’s one of the only times that patton’s seen her hair out of a bun, though he’s never seen it down. he’d had no idea that her hair was so long—he guesses that it might come down to her ribs, maybe even her waist.

“roman wants everything to be a statement,” she says. “he got his dramatics from his father.”

“ah, but he makes it work, doesn’t he?” patton says. “both did, from what i hear, if a bit differently.”

“more than a bit,” isadora says. 

“he wouldn’t be our roman without it, though, would he?” patton points out.

isadora’s lips twitch with what might be a smile.

“no,” isadora says. “no, he certainly wouldn’t.”

“wouldn’t have him any other way,” patton says. “love that kid, i’m thrilled to see what he’s gonna do—not just with the debutante ball, either.”

she’s certainly smiling now. “that’s the wonderful thing about children, isn’t it? watching them grow. like you’ve done with my boy, and i with yours.”

patton smiles, too, a little bittersweet. “gosh. we’re presenting them as adults to society. seems like yesterday roman was putting logan in a dress for a fashion show for the pair of us.”

“oh, yes,” she says, “and roman nearly dropped logan because he wanted to have a grand finale stunt he’d seen the older dancers do, i remember it well.”

patton snorts a little; after the initial rush of paternal panic when logan had clung to roman’s neck and it looked like they were both going down, it had been kind of funny to see logan, eyeshadow smeared over his eyes and lipstick messy on his mouth squawking in protest at roman even as roman had attempted to do the stunt again, even as isadora was telling him all about the importance of recovering from mistakes smoothly on stage. 

“they’ve come a long way from a fashion show for the pair of us.”

“that they have,” isadora agrees, and offers an expression to patton that is the softest he’s ever seen from her. “i’m very fond of your boy, as well.”

patton can’t help but smile—he always smiles when he hears about people loving logan, because it’s logan, his son, of course he’s happy about logan being well-loved.

“we did a good job with them,” patton says musingly. “the weird parenting pool we’ve made—you, me, virgil. we turned out two amazing boys.”

“that we did,” she agrees. “and it looks like they’ll stick with each other. it’s rare for a young love to last so long, i know, but—”

“but they’ve been stuck on each other since they were five,” patton says, with a nod of agreement, and holds his breath as he reaches over to gently squeeze isadora’s hand, moving slowly enough that she could move away if she wanted to. she does not swat him away, so, success! “should we do the stereotypical thing now and start planning their wedding? i think logan and roman would be lovely spring grooms, personally, but i’m not totally set on season yet.”

isadora’s letting out that soft huff once again when the studio door opens, and patton turns to see who it is.

roman, his red backpack slung over one shoulder, him bracing the strap with one hand to unceremoniously dump it on the nearest bench, and scrolling through his phone with the other.

“¡mamá!” he calls.“¿qué peluca crees que se vería—?”

he pauses in his tracks, blinking, before he grins sheepishly at patton.

“hi, pa—mr. sanders,” he corrects. patton can feel the force of the arched eyebrow that ms. prince was giving him to make him correct himself.

“hi, roman,” patton says; he doesn’t know much spanish, so he isn’t really sure what roman’s asking. “how was school?”

“oh! good, good,” roman says. “the cheer squad finally figured out what uniform we’re gonna wear at the next game, and also they finally decided who’s officially escorting who—sasha’s mine, i’ve got a list i was gonna send to logan—”

“do i know sasha?” isadora asks.

“nah, i don’t think she ever took classes here,” roman says. “she’s one of the kids who comes in from the farm towns nearby, y’know?”

isadora nods, noting this, and roman hesitates, looking between patton and isadora, before—

“do you think you can keep a surprise a secret?” roman asks patton.

patton considers this. “well, i can definitely try my best!”

“oh, good, i want opinions,” roman bursts out and rushes over, showing off two pictures on his phone.

patton blinks at them; they look like two people, from what he can tell, with big hair and a lot of makeup, maybe a bit familiar, and if he could get a closer look ohhhh he knows where he recognizes them now.

“so, looking at wig alone, which one?” roman asks, and patton glances at roman, before he looks back at the pictures, and back at roman.

“you’re doing drag?”

“uh-huh,” roman says brightly. “as soon as i got my dress, i realized, like, i have to go full camp with it, you know? it’s this massive eighties monstrosity, i adore it. it’s definitely something a drag queen would wear, and i’ve been looking at makeup tutorials, and—”

“—and i was a private instructor for a few queens back in the day, so i know enough of the process to help,” isadora says, as if this is an utterly casual thing to say and not the most wild job he could imagine for her.

“you did?!”

“mm,” isadora says, sparing him a slightly bemused look, as if his surprise is completely unnecessary.

“i know, i had the same reaction,” roman says to patton. “my mom, isa-diva prince! anyways. from someone who’s seen a lot of drag queens, and someone who has been to a debutante ball—?”

“oh, yeah, i’ve attended one,” patton says, “i just never actually, y’know, debuted. but, um, lemme see the options again—?”

patton, as one might guess, does not know anything about wigs. he doesn’t have to, either, because isadora tuts at roman for one of his options, which is apparently subpar, and her son is going to make his drag debut fabulous—

roman, grinning, sends the link to isadora so that she can order the wig for him, drops a kiss on her cheek then patton’s, and calls, “i’m gonna go change and warm up to get ready for the baby’s class soon! you gotta remember to put in calls to get me an actual fairy drag mother!” and darts up the stairs, the door closing behind him.

patton turns to her, smiling. “drag?”

“drag,” isadora agrees. “he’s been watching some shows for long enough, i’ve been expecting him to at least express a little interest in attempting it for himself. and now he is absolutely exhilarated by the concept of wearing drag to an event that is so traditionally heteronormative and surprising everyone. well, except for you, now, i suppose.”

“everyone?”

“everyone,” isadora confirms. “he hasn’t told logan, or virgil. he wants to see their reactions.”

patton laughs, a little bit. “that seems… very roman.”

isadora huffs softly and agrees, “remember what we said about dramatics?”

⁂

New Groupchat

Logan Sanders, Dee Slange, Poppy McMaster, 1 Unknown Number

Logan Sanders: I’ve taken the liberty of putting everyone involved in the debutante spread for the newspaper into one group text. This is Logan Sanders.

Unknown Number: Hi, Logan, I’m Lauren! We’ve got a friend in common, you’re in the GSA with my boyfriend Kai. 

Dee Slange: dee slange here

Poppy McMaster: I’m Poppy McMaster. 

Logan Sanders: I was wondering where I’d heard your name before. Yes, Kai’s talked about you.

Groupchat has been titled: Franklin Debutante Spread Team

Lauren Patrikis: Okay, so, I think I should get to the debutante lessons about fifteen or so minutes early, just to get my camera set up with the lighting and to get a general idea of the space. Do either of you have ideas on who you want to focus on in your pieces, so I have an idea of who to photograph?

Dee Slange: i’m going to interview ana and janey definitely, plus logan’s dad and the ballet teacher, but other than that, I haven’t settled on who I’m getting quotes from

Lauren Patrikis: Ana and Janey, got it. Logan?

Logan Sanders: One of my pieces is a column from me to explain where the idea came from, and the other one will be focused on dress shopping, but Kram said she got photos for that already.

Lauren Patrikis: Oh yeah lol I went with a few of the other Clairs to get their dresses, so I got that taken care of. Good thing they wanted me there for Instagram otherwise we’d be depending on student-submitted cellphone shots Lauren Patrikis: Not that those aren’t nice, but. You know. Gives off a certain vibe.

Dee Slange: yeah, really convenient for us that you’ve withdrawn your participation into the ball and turned it into something for our direct gain

Logan Sanders: You’re a Clair?

Dee Slange: don’t be obvious logan Dee Slange: ofc she’s a clair

Lauren Patrikis: Haha yeah I’m a Clair

Poppy McMaster: Really??? Poppy McMaster: Can I text you with a few questions about that Poppy McMaster: And about your plans on going into journalism after high school

Lauren Patrikis: Ofc! Love to help a fellow journalism gal, and that you’re an aspiring Clair makes it all the better, girls gotta stick together, right? Lauren Patrikis: no offense boys

Logan Sanders: None taken. We’re all feminists here.

Lauren Patrikis: Now, with all the planning out of the way, can I ask your guys’ specific interests when it comes to the paper? Lauren Patrikis: I’m planning on applying for an editor position next fall, and fingers crossed I get EIC, but I’d be happy with managing or copy, really, and it’d be cool to get an idea of some of the juniors I’d (hopefully!) be working with

Dee Slange is typing…

Logan Sanders is typing...

⁂

“logan?”

logan glances up from his plate, where he’s been spearing scalloped potatoes without really lifting them to his mouth. virgil and patton are giving him twin looks of what might be parental concern, and logan grimaces without really intending to.

they’re having dinner, all three of them, which logan has been carefully edging around calling family dinner in his head, because if he says it aloud, he’s pretty sure it’ll spook virgil or patton. it’s a good dinner, too; the butcher was having a sale, so virgil got three good cuts of steak and made scalloped potatoes and asparagus and herbed butter, with something brought under a round tin that is now in the fridge. patton’s eyes have been darting to it, then back to virgil, trying to evaluate what dessert fulfills virgil’s stringent ideals for nutrition. 

“sorry,” logan says, and eats the scalloped potato that he’s been butchering.

he is also slightly certain that this is their way of having a date night without leaving logan home alone on a week night. he is also edging carefully around that in his mind. he is very happy that they’re dating. it’s just that if he gives any thought to the implications for what they might do after their date it would be, as he would have declared ten years ago, icky. 

the trouble is, logan reflects, is that it’s much more nerve-wracking to come out on another person’s behalf than his own coming out process was. 

as he’s chewing, he reflects; it’s not like virgil is going to have a negative reaction, given that his boyfriend has been openly trans for sixteen years, and in regards to the dress tailoring, the worst virgil can do is say no.

“no need to be sorry, kiddo,” patton says. “busy thinking about that awesome double-pager—”

“—double truck,” logan corrects—

“—which, again, we're so thrilled for you, or is something on your mind?”

logan sighs to himself. there’s an opening if he’s ever heard one.

“dee still needs a tailor for his dress,” he says, and then he turns his attention to virgil. “i am wondering if you would be willing to offer your services.”

virgil’s face twists up.

“look,” virgil says, sets down his fork, and sighs. “i’m glad that you’ve got—i dunno, an understanding or whatever with this guy. you’ve got two more years at that school and i’m glad you’ve settled into things there. but—”

“but,” logan repeats quietly.

“—but,” virgil agrees, looks at patton, who has a polite listening expression on his face, and then virgil looks back at logan again, “look. you might have heard some things about my teenage days around town, and you’re almost an adult, so i don’t really hold any compunctions with telling you i was an asshole. a lot of teenagers are assholes, and some of them even manage to grow out of it. as a former teenager who was also an asshole, i can tell you that i got into some scrapes here and there. now, did i punch a few people on my own? ‘course i did. i was an asshole, i got into fights. but i can tell you that even in the depths of my stupid teenage actions, i never manipulated someone into punching someone else for me.”

logan absorbs this with a slight dip of his chin, a silent go on.

“these are just my two cents,” virgil adds, firmly, “you can do whatever you want, it’s your life, and you’re the one who’s at that school for hours and hours a day, you have a better idea of how to navigate things there than me. but. to add in my two cents, i don’t think the kind of guy who manipulates someone into doing physical harm on his behalf and has been openly very competitive with you to the point of doing something like that is a—a good buddy to hang around.”

he spreads his hands. “i could definitely be wrong. but—”

“but those are your two cents,” logan murmurs. “right.”

patton’s chewing at the inside of his cheek, now. “well,” patton offers timidly, and then snaps his mouth closed, clearly not wanting to spill the secret.

“i know you believe the best in people, patton, and that’s great,” virgil says, reaching over to squeeze patton’s hand. “i’m the jerk in this relationship, i’m aware of that, i can be an overprotective asshole, so i couldn’t sit by and just not say anything. you have the main call, obviously, logan’s your kid and this is your house.”

logan sighs a little, meeting patton’s eyes.

“he said i could tell him,” logan says, nodding his head in virgil’s direction. “he needs the tailor to be able to alter the dress without his parents’ interference. or so i gathered.”

patton sighs, too, except it’s more in relief, and he reaches over his other hand, to clasp virgil’s hand between both of his.

“dee’s…” patton says quietly, and then he straightens up a little. “he’s like me, honey.”

virgil’s brow furrows, ever so slightly. patton tilts his head. they’re looking each other in the eyes, a silent conversation, and patton arches his eyebrows at virgil, as if to punctuate whatever thought they’re nonverbally passing between them.

and then—

“oh,” virgil says blankly, and then he looks to logan. “he’s trans.”

it’s not a question, but logan nods anyways.

“he kind of accidentally mentioned it when he was over for the gsa posters, a month or so ago,” patton says, still quiet. “we promised we wouldn’t tell.”

“‘course not,” virgil says, still with that blank tone, reaching over to pat his hand. “you wouldn’t out someone, i wouldn’t want you to, not without their consent, but why—?”

“the dress,” logan says. “he needs someone to alter the dress to hide his binder. i don’t think he can go to any tailor his parents would bring up, they wouldn’t want him to wear one.”

virgil’s brow furrows. “why not?”

“his father never quite managed to grow out of it,” patton says primly, avoiding the swear. “apparently he found a wife who didn’t, either.”

and so the whole story behind why they’re really doing the debutante ball comes out slowly, as they’re finishing up their meal. virgil sits and listens, brow still furrowed, as logan explains how he’d come up with the idea, and patton provides a little further insight into dee’s background, and logan tells him as much as he can about dee’s house, without disclosing his grandmother’s illness, and by the time they both finish, a deep line’s marring virgil’s usually smooth, pale forehead.

“so,” virgil says slowly. “let me get this gay. you—” he points to logan, “came up with this whole idea to hide dee’s status, and you hid that behind the idea of doing this for feminism.”

“well, two things can be true,” logan points out, very reasonably, he thinks. “it started as just dee, sure, but i still despise the tradition of it and the sexist absurdity of it all should be pointed out.”

“and you,” he says, lightly bumping patton with his shoulder, “are hosting the Get Cultured day, plus a sleepover with the pair of them?”

“there’s—more,” logan says haltingly. “in dee’s life. i think dad could be a help with. i’m not at liberty to say.”

“christ, of course there is,” virgil mutters, rubbing at his forehead, as if he’s developing a headache. “right. i’m getting the chocolate-dipped strawberries—” patton brightens—“and the prosecco.”

“ooh, prosecco,” patton says. “fancy.”

“can i try?” logan asks, more out of curiosity than anything else.

virgil pops the cork, and then turns his eyes to patton, attentively waiting for an answer. patton considers this.

“pour him a little one,” patton says to virgil, who nods, and then proceeds to pour logan the tiniest flute of prosecco he can, before pouring more substantial servings for himself and patton. 

“this has fruity flavors of green apple, juicy peach and ripe lemon, framed by hints of minerality,” virgil reads aloud, before he sets down the bottle, passes over the glasses, and then fetches the tin.

logan takes a cautious sip. patton is watching him do so closely, his hands under his chin, pinning logan with a curious look.

“this tastes like none of those things,” logan informs him. it mostly tastes like fizz, and, if he holds it in his mouth long enough, eventually just bitter grape juice.

“yeah, the whole flavor profile things tend to be bullshit,” virgil says, setting the tin at the center of the table and uncovering it to show off a collection of chocolate-dipped strawberries, drizzled over with dark or white chocolate, sitting in cupcake wrappers, and patton oohs and aahs. 

“don’t say that around my family, or else you’ll be treated of stories of about thirty different wineries,” patton says dryly. “mom thinks she could have been a sommelier in another life.”

“don’t tell me you did the grape-crushing thing with your feet,” virgil says to patton, amused.

“i can neither confirm or deny,” patton says, taking his own sip of prosecco. “ooh, this is good!”

“thanks,” virgil says, then, to logan, “just as a pro-tip for when you’re twenty-one, go for the highest rated wine you can find at the lowest price.”

“highest rated, lowest price, understood,” logan says, and claims three strawberries for himself before his dad can take all the ones with white chocolate.

“and,” virgil adds, “if you find yourself around pretentious people—god knows you will, with your grandparents—just swirl it and sniff it and say oh, the bouquet is lovely, is this oak? or whatever.”

“oh, i can teach you the pretentious way you’re meant to drink wine!” patton says brightly, and so virgil and logan are treated to an informal lesson of how to best hold wine glasses (at the stem, so your fingers don’t transfer heat to the wine, which seems logical) and to swirl them (“you’re supposed to do this with wider glasses and wines that aren’t bubbly mostly, but it helps oxygenate the wine so you can smell it better,” patton says wisely) and how to aerate it while you’re drinking (“you’re kidding,” logan says, but obligingly attempts to suck in air and not dribble prosecco from his mouth simultaneously) and the three of them try their very best to drink their wine in as ostentatious a fashion as possible.

once logan’s had his fill of strawberries, and finished his tiny helping of prosecco, he helps wash the dishes and graciously bows out of the kitchen as subtly as he can. virgil and patton pour themselves thirds, kissing as they clink glasses when they think logan’s out of sight.

logan thinks he’s managed to be a fairly good third wheel to this date.

⁂

“well, i’ve got mine hanging in the closet,” patton says. “have you gotten yours yet?”

virgil groans; he’s feeling much too pleasant to think about such things. 

patton’s sitting almost in his lap; his thighs are slung over virgil’s, at any rate, and virgil’s got his free hand resting on patton’s thigh, absently kneading at the muscle, savoring the warmth and weight of him. patton’s got his free hand playing with virgil’s hair; they’re both finishing off the last of the prosecco and talking about the debutante ball.

virgil knocks the last of his back, and sets the flute aside.

“i’ll get mine while you and the kids are off for Get Cultured day,” virgil grumbles. “a tux. ugh. no one more than the people who’re absolutely necessary will see me in that.”

patton smiles at him, fondness making his eyes go softer and sweeter than usual; his cheeks are pink, probably from the prosecco. 

“you’re forgetting that we’re all gonna see you wear it at the ball,” patton points out, voice sugary, and virgil groans, tilting his head back, and therefore into patton’s hand; patton bears the weight of it gently, his hand bracing his skull, giggling even as he does.

“and don’t forget your white gloves,” patton points out, and virgil groans louder.

“oh, stop,” patton says, but any scolding attempt is ruined by how tender he sounds, the way he carefully tilts virgil’s head so he’s looking at him; virgil’s eyes trace along his cupid’s bow lips, lush and wet from the prosecco, the curve of his jaw, his eyes, a loving expression in them that makes virgil’s chest ache with devotion, his cheeks, going pinker the longer virgil looks. his eyelashes brush against his cheeks when he looks down for a moment, unable to hold eye contact.

patton seems to rally, shaking himself a little, before he says with great dignity, “you know looking at me like that makes me go to bits.”

virgil tries for a smirk, but it probably comes out soppy and moonstruck. “do i?”

“you know very well,” patton huffs, before he sits up a little and says, “and. you’re all deeply touched that roman asked you, i know you are.”

virgil’s the one to break eye contact, now, looking down at patton’s legs in his lap and mumbling excuses that sound weak even to himself. honestly, it’s a bit of a miracle he manages to get it out around the lump in his throat.

“i was talking to isadora, about our weird little circle of parenting,” patton continues, his tone victorious. “you, me, her. the boys. our boys.”

virgil squeezes patton’s thigh again, just listening.

“logan and roman are credits to you,” patton says. “not just us.”

virgil squirms a little. sentimentality is still not his strong suit. “you—and ms. prince—are the ones who raised them, took care of them day and night. i helped out where i could. and,” he kisses patton’s cheek, “you’re the ones who let me into your lives, so. they’re still majorly credits to you.”

“mm,” patton says, and looks at him with half-lidded, slightly mischievous eyes. “we’ll call it even, how about that?”

virgil snorts again and says, “if you think i’m about to claim credit for an isadora prince production, i hope you’ll plan out my funeral.”

patton swats his shoulder, but conversation veers away from virgil’s role in the kids’ lives.

good. if they go too much into parental feelings after virgil’s had three glasses of prosecco, he’s pretty sure he’ll get all annoyingly teary, and he’s pretty sure patton would think it cute and sweet, but he doesn’t exactly plan on getting all annoyingly teary to conclude this date.

⁂

the excuse that he’s told logan is that dee is coming early to survey the studio and help set things up.

the fact of it all is that he could probably drive his range rover in fifty laps around this town and he could probably still find something new to surprise him, like some kind of small-town culture shock.

for example—his range rover sticks out like a sore thumb. he has already spotted five people gawking at it as he drives around. two people even elbowed their walking companion and pointed. 

they’re in for an influx of bmws and mercedes’ bought with daddy’s money—dee supposes it must be a car enthusiast’s idea of christmas to be able to see all the chilton students’ cars unexpectedly flood this tiny town, whose ideas of automobile finery are probably topping out at a prius.

he spies the punnily-named cat-themed store that he’d been so boggled by the last time he was here, and the community garden, and the town is just as kitschy as it was at night, except now he can see better in the light of day, instead of the light of fairy lights and wrought-iron street lamps. 

now, he can see a local newsstand. he didn’t even know those still existed. on the same level of outdated absurdity, there is something called a mailboxes etc., which he can only hope is this town’s excuse for a post office. there is also a shoe repair store, because apparently these people are right out of the victorian era and have employed cobblers in this town.

there is a store called harry’s house of twinkle lights, which only sells twinkle lights, how on earth is that a sustainable business model? 

incongruously, there is a tattoo shop right beside the famed virgil’s diner he’s heard logan talk about so much. he spends a lot of time parked in the street, staring at that. a tattoo parlor. well, at least something in this town has evolved past the ideals of a fifties housewife.

(there is a black lives matter sign in a place of pride in the window, along with a rainbow flag. there are a lot of pride flags waving brightly in the bleak wind, of all stripes and colors. there are black lives matter signs staked in a lot of front yards, actually.)

(in his neighborhood, there are no black lives matter signs staked on the professionally manicured lawns. he isn’t even allowed to have one in his room. he’s tried. his parents threw it out.)

dee checks the time, clears his throat forcefully, and moves to park as close to the dance studio as he can.

he’d seen it before; he’d watched as logan got all moony-eyed and reverent at his boyfriend dancing in the window, without the boyfriend’s awareness. it isn’t particularly difficult to find—it’s in what passes as the town square, which he supposes makes it as a technicality of being the shape of a square.

it’s also easy to spot because logan is out front, along with another boy their age; he recognizes him from logan’s birthday party last fall.

he hops out of the car, locking it as he does so (the town may look like it’s a fifties housewife’s dream, but he doesn’t know the crime rates of this town off the top of his head, and his sleepover bag is right in the back, looking prime for someone to steal, but the most they’d get is a decent bag, some clothes and toiletries, and his phone charger, so there.) logan glances at him, holding up one half of the sign; the boy (roman, dee remembers) glowers at him behind logan’s back, and dee tries his very hardest not to grin. thank goodness, something fun today.

“i didn’t know you had your license,” logan comments. he’s in jeans, but otherwise he still looks like an accountant (an actual accountant, not the wink-wink nudge-nudge joking kind that’s been popularized over that one song that says the accountant is a cover for really being a sex worker)—he’s wearing a collared shirt and tie, and a jacket on top of that.

“turned sixteen in february,” dee says.

“well,” logan says. “happy belated birthday, i suppose. roman, would you pass me the tape—?”

even dee has to admit roman is very well-dressed. he is wearing a black overcoat that is so nice that dee would not be embarrassed to wear it over a collared shirt, a red-and-black plaid sweater, and a pair of black, pleated, high-waisted pants and a pair of black booties. it’s like he’s stepped off someone’s painstakingly curated ✨ winter fashion ✨ pinterest board.

roman, however, is still glowering at dee even as he ensures his half of the sign will hold and passes logan the tape.

dee tucks his hands into his pockets. the wind is sweeping in their direction, which means his cape is flowing dramatically in the wind. it’s like he choreographed it. he hopes he looks like a norse god sweeping down to enact destruction.

“roman prince, i remember,” dee says smoothly. “we had a conversation at logan’s birthday party. nice to see you again.”

roman’s scowl deepens. “i can’t say that’s mutual, villain,” he declares, and takes a moment to ensure logan’s got a grasp on the sign (he does, he’s taping the last corner to the window) sweeps dramatically off into the studio with his nose in the air. dee can’t help but laugh.

logan simply looks chagrined.

“villain,” dee repeats, delighted. 

logan rolls his eyes at dee and says, “my dad is just about the only one who’s forgiven the louise incident from you, so. be cautious.”

“when you say the only one,” dee begins.

“virgil and roman are the primary grudge-holders in the family,” logan says absently, too busy smearing a hand over the corner to ensure it’ll stick to the window to catch dee blinking at him, caught off-guard—family?—before logan continues, “and i suppose ms. prince, but ms. prince terrifies most she interacts with anyways, so the fact that she’ll hold a grudge should be indecipherable to those who are not practiced in conversing with her.”

“terrifying?” he asks.

logan looks away from the window at last, the corners of his mouth lifted ever so slightly. if dee didn’t know any better, he’d think that logan was being mischievous.

“oh, yes,” he says. “i’m uncertain if you’ll fear her or love her. perhaps both in equal measure.”

forget the tattoo parlor, this ms. prince woman is by far the most fascinating thing about this stupidly charming town.

dee looks at the sign. DEBUTANTE BALL TRAINING HERE, in logan’s neat hand, and then underneath it in a scrawling, well-practiced calligrapher’s cursive, GET CULTURED DAY! and a variety of other doodles around it. there are sparkles. he briefly entertains the mental image that logan is actually a sparkle enthusiast behind closed doors, but also, dee has seen his boyfriend, so. he’s got a feeling on who insists on sparkles in that relationship.

“well,” dee says, and nods to the door. “shall we?”

logan opens the door as an answer.

dee steps through, pausing just for a moment to sweep his eyes over the dance studio.

there are what look like old church pews in the hall, which leads back to what looks like a small room and a set of stairs; it is, he knows just by looking, renovated from an old building in town—a barn, maybe, or an old house, but one can hardly tell once they’re inside it.

he steps into the actual studio. the studio itself has two walls lined with mirrors, one with the windows facing out into the street, and a few windows facing out into the hallway. there are three round tables shoved to one half of the room; patton sanders, in one of his sweaters (a muted shade of plum, today) and jeans; a short, brown-skinned woman with her black hair swept back into an impressively tight bun.

they both glance over at the sound of someone entering; patton brightens, the woman frowns.

“dee!” patton says. “happy you made it, kiddo, c’mon in!”

the woman must be ms. prince.

ah. roman prince. this is roman’s mother.

“this is isadora prince, but she’s ms. prince to you,” patton prattles on cheerfully, seemingly ignoring the fact that the woman is sizing him up—predator knows predator, dee supposes, so he does not feel any compunctions about doing the same. 

“she’ll be teaching all the dance stuff, the movement things,” patton says, “and i’ve got how to behave yourselves in a fancy-schmancy setting like this. plus, like, the proper walk. now, it’s been a few years since i’ve taken lessons, so i might be a bit rusty, but—”

dee stops paying attention, then, too busy tilting his head ever so slightly to survey ms. prince. she looks almost clinically disinterested, except for a unyielding, rigid look in her eyes that simply gives away impressions of stubbornness, but nothing of observational value. dee could have guessed she’s stubborn, she’s a single mother, as far as he knows, and a ballet teacher. aspects of both of those things require a certain amount of tenacity.

the closest thing dee can amount her expression to is a no-nonsense substitute teacher waiting for class to calm down, with the eerie sense of preternatural calm that the entire class will be in trouble far beyond their wildest dreams. 

it absolutely does nothing to him. he does not react at all. if, perhaps, there is a chill sent down his spine, it is obviously because the heating system in here is inadequate and the old, shoddy architecture is clearly allowing a draft.

“...think it should be okay!” patton finishes, smiling still, completely unaware of what has come to pass. “‘course, i haven’t been around teenagers in a while that aren’t you, logan, and roman, but i manage the part-timer kids at the inn okay, so fingers crossed it’s the same for the chilton kids.”

ms. prince looks away from him. he does not feel anything that could possibly be likened to someone removing the last piece of rubble that was pinning someone down, and at last they could scramble away.

“you shall manage just fine,” isadora says. it sounds less like a comforting statement and more like the prediction of a military officer before a battle.

patton nods, seemingly bolstered by this. dee does not even try to imagine what would have happened if he wasn’t.

“can we practice?” roman says, doing his very best to pretend that dee isn’t there; dee rolls his eyes, even as patton exclaims “‘course we can!” and logan leans in to murmur, “roman usually assists his mother with dance classes, he’ll do the same for the dances we’ll need to learn.”

isadora moves to turn on music, and patton and roman turn to face each other. patton smiles at him encouragingly, and, as if unable to help it, roman smiles back as the music comes in, with an old-timey blare of horns.

“may i have this dance?” patton offers gallantly.

roman tee-hees and takes on a nasally tone reminiscent of most rich brats as portrayed on television, “i dunno, do you have a trust fund?” before he turns and declares, in a passable teacher’s tone, “always make sure, ladies, we’re mocking the original purpose of the ball! gold-dig away!”

it makes patton laugh and logan smile, but roman takes patton’s hand without waiting for his answer. 

patton promptly assumes form—dee isn’t sure why he’s surprised it’s picture-perfect, but he is anyways—and roman does too, their hands clasped together, roman’s opposite hand on patton’s arm and patton’s hand resting on roman’s shoulder blade. 

patton counts aloud as they sweep across the room, “one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three,” for his own benefit or for roman’s, he isn’t sure. 

if not for that, if not for the surroundings of this dance studio, if not for their relatively casual state of dress, if not for the frank sinatra in the background, dee could easily believe that they were leading the opening dance of the actual debutante ball. 

if roman were in his debutante gown, if patton were in his tuxedo, if the studio surrounding them was replaced by a beautiful, marble ballroom, then they would have been the jealousies of everyone at the ball.

roman, dee observes, is good. patton dances with the practiced air of someone who learned how to do this years ago, and roman’s ability to keep pace is so well-matched that dee passively wonders if they make a habit of dancing together; if perhaps they share a common hobby of attending sock-hops.

he recalls the dance-a-thon poster he’d seen while he was in town. he really cannot discount this theory.

“dee?”

dee looks away from the pair of them twirling around the room, roman’s coat flaring with them the way his skirt eventually will.

logan gestures to the table, and holds up a handful each of forks and knives. “would you help me with these?”

you expect me to do what, he nearly says, before he recalls his excuse to get here early was to help set up, and so he heads over to the table, logan handing him the forks and knives, dee setting the table as if for a proper three-course dinner. 

he watches patton laugh as he dips roman, roman laughing too, their faces lighting up with it; he glances over out of the corner of his eyes, and he sees logan’s eyes gone soft, the way that dee has only ever seen him do once, that night of the poster-making when he had watched roman without being aware. he’s stopped unfolding the cloth napkins to stare at roman, that look on his face, the corners of his mouth lifted up; he has the fond expression of someone wed to their husband for fifteen years, watching them do the thing they love, not watching boyfriend of less than three months. 

huh. logan sanders is a sap. he honestly wouldn’t have guessed it.

he mentally analyzes his memories of seeing logan and roman together; at the chilton dance, logan watching him through the window, and now. all three times, logan had looked at roman like he'd hung the moon and stars.

it bears further observation, for certain.

dee clears his throat loudly, just for the pleasure of seeing logan jump, come back into himself, and hastily resume placing napkins.

dee smirks to himself as he straightens the dessert spoon.

all right. that is also his major motivation to continue the observation—the fun of watching logan get flustered. 

⁂

so maybe patton hasn’t thought about the way that a lot of teenagers are until virgil brought it up over dinner, but honestly, patton doesn’t think it’s his fault he overlooked that.

his track record with teenagers isn’t exactly a stellar one: when he was one, he was something of a wild child, and the other teenagers only ever really liked him at parties, and their opinion declined even more once he came out, and then that opinion crashed straight through rock bottom to start digging for the center of the earth when he got pregnant. 

then he dropped out of school, and moved here, and he didn’t really have much interaction with other teenagers in sideshire, except for the occasional part-timer at the inn, who mostly treated him cordially, if a bit awkwardly. 

then he kept working with those teenage part-timers, who were technically coworkers, and most of them carried that same generally friendly attitude throughout the years; then his boys turned thirteen, but he’d been so used to the pair of them, the only turmoil they’d had to deal with were occasional emotional outbursts and boy drama. 

and now, well. dee, too, he supposes. he isn’t sure how much dee qualifies as a typical teenager, though, what with him dressing like a victorian gentleman on an off day and his apparent secret that logan’s hinted at but not said.

and now an incoming horde of chilton students. the last generation of chilton students he’d dealt with while he was at chilton, and he’s pretty sure those opinions are still slow-cooking in the lava in the core of the earth. he isn’t sure how a new generation of chilton students is going to be. for one, they’re chilton students. for another, they’re teenagers. 

so patton is maybe a little nervous about today!

the boys are milling about the room, checking on everything. roman seems to have settled on the strategy of ignoring dee, which seems to suit dee just fine, even amuse him, a little bit. logan goes back and forth between helping the pair of them—dee with the tables, roman with nametags—and isadora is scrolling through her phone, checking to make sure she has waltz-appropriate music queued up, and patton…

well. patton is nervously pacing around the room, trying to see if he can poke in somewhere in help, but apparently they’ve all got it covered, so. patton’s job is apparently pacing.

unsurprisingly, the sideshire kids filter in first; brick comes bearing what they say is a gift from virgil, handing patton a tray full of heat-preserving cups for the four of them, and patton eagerly removes the top to sniff it only to pout that it’s decaf before he passes out the other three drinks to isadora, roman, and logan.

“hi,” brick says to dee.

“hello,” dee says warily, hovering near the corner of the room.

“wicked cool cape,” brick says. “you’ve got the phantom of the opera thing going on, then?”

dee lifts his eyebrows, looks as if he is about to do something that will be great fun, and says in a tone that is mildly threatening, “was that a joke about my vitiligo?”

“okay!” patton breaks in, as brick starts to look like they’re about to fall all over themselves in apology, “brick, kiddo, this is dee, he goes to logan’s school. how about you go on over with roman and get your nametag, huh?”

brick scampers off with a squeaky “sorry!” and patton turns to dee.

“be nice,” he says, in the same tone he’d use when logan was in kindergarten and demanding to know how on earth the other kids were unaware of what he’d thought to be universal common knowledge, like the heat death of the universe. 

“it’s too easy,” dee complains, gesturing to his face. 

“be,” patton repeats pointedly, “polite. i know that wasn’t the best thing for them to say, it was not a very good comparison, but they were talking about your clothes, not your face.”

with a facial expression much the same as six-year-old logan grumbling about how it isn’t his fault the universe might one day reach thermodynamic equilibrium, dee sighs before he goes over to pick up a nametag off the table.

“don’t worry, brick,” roman says, giving dee a dirty look, “that villain is vile to everyone he meets. it’s such a disaster that’s probably where he got his name. dee-saster.”

patton looks between them. brick, looking very much like they would like to duck out of this conversation now please; roman, victorious in his nicknamery even though patton can admit quietly to himself that it’s not exactly roman’s best work; and dee, who looks entirely unaffected. 

and then he smiles. a placid, calm smile. he looks rather mild-mannered, actually. the room is quiet.

“you wanna kiss me so bad it makes you look stupid,” dee returns, and roman looks terribly offended, his hand flying to his chest.

“exCUSE you,” roman says very loudly, “i am very happily and VERY CONTENTEDLY in LOVE with the HANDSOME man whose face you chose to MAR through—through your machiavellian manipulations and jealousy of logan’s many talents like you’re the stepmother in snow white! how dare you! i—ew!” he says, sounding like that one character in the canadian sitcom he’s trying to make logan watch. he’s clearly about to continue, but patton takes that as his cue to cut in.

“boys,” patton says loudly. he waits for them both to be quiet before he continues.

“be polite,” he repeats sternly, putting his hands on his hips. “be nice. we are here today to learn about absurd, sexist traditions that we all plan on going in and upheaving, and any good heist team needs to get along! am i clear?”

roman sighs but grumbles out an affirmative; dee rolls his eyes but does the same.

“good,” patton says, and points. “dee, please go help logan. roman—stay here.”

the boys, at last, split up.

“sorry,” brick repeats to dee.

dee shrugs. “i’ve heard it before.”

“still,” brick says, “i’m really sorry. patton’s right. that was a bad comparison to make, i should’ve said mr. darcy or something,” and then brick proceeds to stand as close to isadora’s general vicinity as they dare, as if her mere presence will protect them from any other catastrophes.

it probably will, honestly.

any awkwardness in the air doesn’t linger very long, though, because some other sideshire kids come in; elliott, for one, so they can go stand with brick, along with a few members of the cheerleading squad, which means that roman is distracted. there’s a girl with a camera he doesn’t recognize, but patton’s guessing she’s probably with the franklin, because she splits straight off to talk to logan and dee, stopping briefly to introduce herself to him and isadora, before she takes up residency in a corner and starts adjusting her camera’s settings.

dee and logan stand in the back, heads tilted toward each other, speaking quietly; he catches something about how brick’s in the theater program at school with roman before patton turns his attention to asking isadora a question about waltzing. at one point, brick accidentally catches dee’s eyes, and rather than scowl at them or anything, dee, instead, nods, as if in acceptance. brick’s shoulders relax, they nod back, and they turn to resume talking to elliott.

huh. that’s something.

he doesn’t really have time to think on it, though, because then the first wave of chilton kids start arriving.

the difference between the sideshire kids and the chilton kids is immediately stark, even though it’s not anything as visible as the quality of their clothes, or the way they look, or like all the chilton kids are wearing their blue-and-navy and the sideshire kids are wearing their red-and-white. 

it’s in the way they’re acting. 

the chilton kids are all in clumps of each other, and patton’s sure that logan and dee could tell him the precise clique each of them are in; a group of girls whisper behind hands and giggle together, and the sideshire cheerleaders look immediately ticked off at the sound of it. a group of chilton boys bump up against each other and ruffle hair in typical teenage rough-housing fashion, scoffing at their surroundings together, and the sideshire boys—if patton’s looking at them right, he thinks that group’s mostly the hockey team—look like they’re ready to go over and join in with the rough-housing with a much less friendly intention.

so. patton might have his work cut out for him. he'd say the same for isadora, but he holds no illusions about the fact that isadora will be able to rule her half of teenagers with a firm hand.

once the time ticks to the new hour, patton looks at isadora, who simply nods at him.

right. patton’s doing this on his own, then.

he steps forward into the front of the room, clapping a few times to get everyone’s attention; their conversations die down, and all of their eyes turn on him.

all of their eyes. they’re all watching him. waiting for what he’s going to say. a group of teenagers. yay. so fun.

why is patton’s mouth suddenly so dry.

patton wipes his suddenly sweaty hands on his pants, trying to pass it off like he’s putting his hands in his pockets.

“hi!” he says, in a bright and cheerful tone that sounds fake to his own ears. “i’m patton sanders, some of you might know me as the manager of the independence inn here and town, others might just know me as logan’s dad.”

logan hunches his shoulders slightly when some chilton kids look back at him, looking so much like virgil for a second that patton’s heart pulses a little stronger than usual.

“—and this is ms. prince,” patton continues, gesturing to isadora, “she owns the ballet studio here in town and has been very gracious to let us use this space and to join in on teaching you kids how to waltz properly. she’s a professional ballerina, so this is a really unique opportunity for everyone!”

isadora crosses her arms over her chest. the kids do not look particularly enthused about this really unique opportunity.

“okay,” patton says. “um—if you haven’t already, go ahead and grab your nametags over there at that table, that’s roman, he’s gonna help us out with the waltzing today. we’re splitting you up into two groups, we’ve already assigned—”

some of the kids groan.

“—you’re probably still going to be with some of your friends!” patton continues. “um, it’s just the two groups, one of them will learn dancing first and the other one will get a review of the proper etiquette to have at these sorts of events, and then we’ll switch, and then we can convene back together as one big group to answer any questions you might have, or practice the dance all together, does that sound good?”

there’s a chorus of teenagers grumbling in agreement.

“okay!” patton says, putting a lot of effort into maintaining his bright tone. “if you’ll take a look at your name tag, red dots are with ms. prince first, blue dots are with me, all right?”

there isn’t even a chorus of teenagers grumbling in agreement this time.

“um,” patton says, then, because it seems like the thing to do, “any questions?”

it is a terrible mistake.

“didn’t you get pregnant when you were sixteen?” one of the chilton girls with a very familiar pair of eyes and a strikingly similar chin (god, if this kid is somehow related to shauna christy, and she probably is, patton’s going to have a terrible time trying to teach her anything) and patton clears his throat.

“i, um—yep. yep, i did—”

“wait, you got pregnant?” another chilton student says.

“i’m trans,” patton says, really hoping this isn’t going where it’s about to go, “so, any questions about the ball—”

the first girl, the one who might be related to shauna christy, makes a loud noise as if she is about to ask another question, but there is something louder that even makes patton jump a little.

the entire room swivels to look at what has caused the noise, only to see dee with his hands hovering casually in the air, as if he’s still holding the massive block that isadora uses as a standing prop.

“christy,” dee says, still with that same calm voice (aha! a tiny voice in patton’s head says, i was right, she IS related to shauna!) “if you continue this line of questioning, everyone in this room will know precisely why the words ‘snyder’s hanover’ are significant to you.” 

christy goes incredibly pale, and she squeaks out, “how the hell could you know about—?”

“well, i didn’t,” dee says, looking remarkably pleased with himself. “not for sure, anyways, but now i do.”

the chilton students turn curious eyes to christy, who goes beet red.

dee surveys them all with the same air patton's mother gets whenever she’s observing the way a new maid cleans to see if it’s to her satisfaction. 

“i know at least five significant things about every chilton student in this room,” he continues imperiously. “if you all don’t shut up and let us get this over with so i can get a unique college essay and not just a story about how i was adopted at a young age that thousands of other students will surely have, i will sow social chaos unlike anything this school has ever seen. those of you who will recall the nettie eckstrand incident will know that is not an idle threat.”

a tall, blond boy snorts and says, “what are you gonna do about it? swim back home to haiti?”

“hey,” patton says sternly, but before he can really lecture this boy, dee holds up a gloved hand.

dee looks at the boy, sweeping his eyes up and down him. the entire room is silent; though the chilton kids are clearly waiting with bated breath, even the sideshire kids seem like they’re interested, a fresh batch of drama and gossip that doesn’t affect their school at all. the boy is all smirking, postured swagger, every inch the stereotypical young, rich white boy who’d known no consequences.

then dee looks him dead in the eyes and says, “pj harvey.”

okay, look, patton doesn’t know why a musical artist who was very popular in the nineties has to do with anything, but before he can say anything the boy surges forward, as if to fight him—

“HEY, HEY!” patton yells— 

—and he’s stopped in his tracks by two of his friends who step in to hold him back, and he huffs, straightening his jacket with a bit more fervor than necessary. he stalks off, which doesn’t have quite the effect it would’ve if he’d stormed out of the room.

dee hadn’t even flinched.

patton looks to isadora for help—he can’t imagine she’s often had brawling ballerinas in her classroom, though—but before either of them say anything, a tiny, dirty-blonde girl bursts out from the corner.

“now that the male posturing is done,” she declares impatiently, “can we get to the part where we subvert patriarchal expectations, please? we all have homework to do after this and some of you really need to at least try to make it seem like school is for more than making out with each other and killing your brain cells with alcohol.”

“okay!” patton blurts out, before anyone else can try to start a fight with her, “blue dots over here, please, blue over here!”

the girl comes over to his side of the room first, as does dee.

great.

patton spies her nametag, too; POPPY MCMASTER.

ah. she’s the escort to logan’s debutante. 

even better.

as logan’s crossing the room to join with the red dots, patton bends his head close to his ear and murmurs, “goodness, aren't your chilton friends…" he wracks his brain for a good word, "so enthusiastic?”

logan scowls, and returns in an equally quiet voice, “first of all, that is not exclusively a chilton thing, you have known roman for over a decade, and secondly, poppy isn't quite a friend, she has more attached herself to me in the hopes that i will be a mentor to her and give her an editor position her junior year.”

patton opens and closes his mouth a few times, before he says, "excellent," what on earth is in the water at that school, before he pushes logan gently in ms. prince’s direction and turns his attention to the group of teenagers.

they are not any less intimidating when halved.

“right,” patton says brightly. “let’s get this Get Cultured day started!”

[itskyleeyo]

hadestown brain dump (songs)

SPOILERS FOR HADESTOWN/THE STORY OF ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE

ok so it may have been more than a few days, but what're you gonna do about it?

so i wanted to do another brain dump, and i wanted to listen to hadestown, so i'm doing a song by song brain dump as i go along. this means that my thoughts are going to be even more stream-of-consciousness style (if that's even possible.) also i'm talking specifically about the original broadway cast recording bc i haven't listened to any other version. (also this was completed across multiple months so it is even more chaotic lmao).

also i highly recommend that you listen to the musical and/or pull up the lyrics as you go along! enjoy!

road to hell. the way andre brings in the chorus is flawless please. also the way that hermes is both a narrator and a character in the story he's narrating? beautiful. "the king of the mine." he sounds so nice here for some reason. also love his self-introduction "maybe it will turn out this time" no it won't but thank you for trying. also breaking the fourth wall to acknowledge the chorus and crew is so nice, here comes reeve ;) mans sounds like an angel. you can hear amber's voice stick out of the chorus and i literally love it so much. i'd die for amber gray but we'll get to that later.

any way the wind blows. the fates literally sound so perfect together. Eva's intro throws me off every time, she sounds so pretty. dear god the harmonies with the fates hit so different. can this cast please narrate my life? there's the wind comparisons ;D the "ooos" are so good. "and it ain't because i'm kind" idk i just like how andre sounds here. oh and the funny behind "so i took him underneath my wing" because hermes has wings on his helmet and shoes.

come home with me. orpheus is so oblivious but i love it. also eurydice is literally such a mood. the wordplay with "come again". the "oh, he's crazy" is my favorite part of the whole song. also eva's voice acting is so good.

wedding song. the way she says "lover"? my ass cannot handle this. eva sounds so smug in the beginning of this song and i love it. "sing the song ;)" eurydice is so fantastic. the chorus of "la" is so pretty. eva joining in during the end is just. so perfect.

epic i. hell yeah introduce the king and queen (both literally and figuratively). reeve's falsetto <3 the way orpheus looks to hermes for approval throughout the musical. hermes narrating over orpheus singing.

livin' it up on top. HELL YES THE QUEEN HAS ARRIVED. i love amber gray so much. the gravel and the rasp. please step on me. also i love the idea of persephone being the wine aunt, especially because media usually portrays her as soft and breakable. the way she says "haaard". the way the music gets more upbeat and energetic when hermes says "the world came back to liiife!" the instrumental/dance? break is so good. please kill me with that trumpet good sir. the leadup to when amber starts singing again. orpheus really knows how to give a speech. "i will ;)" amber please step on me i am not joking.

all i've ever known (intro). thank you for the intro king. the music is so pretty. the way it picks up with the piano part <3

all i've ever known. eva sounds so pretty dear god. yay more wind references! the wordplay with "hold". and also the references to hot and cold throughout the musical. "i don't wanna ever have to let you go." lol ironic because she ends up going with hades. "i knew you before we met, and i don't even know you yet." the fucking wordplay. like holy shit. the "love at first sight" feelings. this line gets me every damn time. the wordplay from 2:10 - 2:38 is so fucking incredible. i lose it every time istg. the instrumental portion is so pretty. the wind! "we'll always be like this" i fucking love irony so much. its so underrated and adds so many layers to the story.

way down hadestown. amber gray. that's it. "you either get to hell or to hadestown, ain't no difference anymore". i fucking love this line so much. not really sure why but the delivery is perfect. also the whole thing with it being a train? i love that so much. all the allusions and comparisons they can make are fantastic. more amber gray appreciation. and ofc. the fates. more fantastic instrumental breaks. "and you better forget about your wishing well." this line is so good but so sad because its literally persephone saying that "hey, fair warning, life is shit down there" and i feel bad for her. like the way she's super sassy and shit, but just stops singing when hades gets there, you can tell that she's definitely not ok. speaking of hades, holy shit patrick page. sounds so fucking fantastic. thank you for existing good sir. eva with the breathtaking single lines. and eva's voice standing out when she sings "ground".

a gathering storm. the constant references to weather and nature throughout the whole musical. eurydice with the common sense. the wind again! "did you hear me, orpheus?" he did not, in fact, hear her.

epic ii. the different names for hades in each epic make me so happy. hades thoughts: "i think my wife might not come back cause i'm super controlling. whatever shall i do? oh, i know! be even more controlling!" lmao dumbass motherfucker. that might not work out so well. i fucking love the transition into "chant" so much.

chant. this is one of my favorite songs from the musical. the wordplay within the entire song is so fucking fantastic. hades singing about desire and then orpheus singing the "song of love" was definitely done on purpose and i'm living for it. every single one of eva's lines make me emotional. ma'am why are you good at everything?? the band! more weather references! patrick page singing "lover" hits different. orpheus singing about hades and persephone being blind and deaf. lmao irony because he's not paying attention to anything around him. the wind! weather! "the song of love" is what brought orpheus and eurydice together, but orpheus' devotion to finishing it is what drives eurydice to hades. "did you think i'd be impressed" i was right ;) it didn't work out so well.

hey, little songbird. the strings <3 patrick page is a god (lol i'm so funny). how does he manage to make manipulation sound so good? bird references! the vocal contrast! eva's voice has this kind of "innocence" to it. especially compared to patrick. not sure if that's on purpose or not, but i love it. also the low note kills me every time. the octave jumps between patrick and eva's voices is just. ugh. and also eva's entire second verse is so fucking good. the emotion she portrays in her voice is so spectacular. seriously hades with the manipulation is so interesting and its so good. (manipulation is not a good thing i just mean that its done so well in the show. do not manipulate people!)

when the chips are down (intro). "your ticket ;)" yes pls sir i'll take a ticket cause life sucks ass.

when the chips are down. i fucking love the fates dear god. gambling references! eva has literally one line and still owns my heart. the band! "shoot to kill" sounds so good like i love it so much pls. also this fucking line "cast your eyes to heaven, you get a knife in the back" is so good. i'm gonna have to get into quite a few lines throughout the musical in a different brain dump because i have so much thought.

gone, i'm gone. darling eurydice. its not your fault that you're starving stop apologizing. "talk of sin" lol she do be going to hell. that's funny. the harmonies.

wait for me (intro). the piano. heremes trying to change the subject hurts my heart. and orpheus' reaction is so sad please. "no.." just rip my fucking heart out, why don't you?

wait for me. the transition. andre coming in clutch with the narration. reeve sounds wonderful, as always. the fucking fates. just kill me already. they literally sound so good. the strings' build up between the "la"s. the chorus. the buildup at the end.

why we build the wall. the total 180 in the vibes. call and response has a special pace in my heart. mr page killing it again. god, hades is such a piece of shit and its perfect. he really is a master manipulator. fuck capitalism. the chorus sounds so good. i want to platonically smooch all of them. jesus fucking christ burn capitalism to the ground. the end is amazing. also the not-so-subtle references to slavery/forced labor.

why we build the wall (outro). i'd die for andre. "anybody want a drink?" yes ma'am. yes please. (don't drink, kids) i love you so much.

our lady of the underground. its so jazzy! jesus fucking christ. oh my fucking god. i would literally sell my soul for amber gray. what did we ever do to deserve her? god the raspiness fucking kills me. also love that she breaks the fourth wall to acknowledge the band. when she comes back in after the instrumental break? consider me dead. "what the boss don't know, the boss won't mind" she sounds so good here. also i love that she straight up doesn't give a fuck about hades here.

way down hadestown (reprise). hell yeah i love reprises. the fates. andre. the chorus. i love them all. i'm such a whore for reoccurring lyrics. the strings! fuck capitalism! eva's emotions are just so fucking good. "you've already forgot?" holy shit. this shit hurted. the "ahh ooh"s are so good.

flowers. the intro <3. eva sounds so pretty. the fucking symbolism in this song is incredible. i'm gonna get into this in another brain dump bc it's a very sensitive topic. the fact that she can't actually fully remember orpheus makes me so sad. so pretty <3

come home with me (reprise). hell yeah another reprise. the way the music is much more upbeat when orpheus shows up. their excitement! eva's vocal emotions are literally so fantastic pls.

papers (intro). "young mannn" kill me patrick. train references! hell yeah persephone. the way andre gets louder when he says "raised up his voice." eva <3. reeve just always sounds so pretty. ohmygod the laugh. kill me good sir. mans straight up admits to owning people and is like "it's cool tho cause they signed a piece of paper. def not taking advantage of people that are literally starving or anything. it's fine." fuck you hades. go step on a fucking lego. orpheus is so sad :(

papers (instrumental). yes. sounds so good. i'm imagining an epic chase scene. the transition into nothing changes <3

nothing changes. respectfully? the fates could kill me any day and i'd thank them. the weather reference! that "anyhow" is so fucking good istg.

if it's true. another one of my favorites. pop off intro. the broken "is this how the world is?" sadly, yes. "but everybody knows that walls have ears." is literally such a powerful line to me for some reason. it does a great job of bringing in the chorus. and by calling the workers "walls" it shows that hades views them as "less than." they aren't even referred to as people. "what's the use of his backbone if he never stands upright." oh my god. because they literally cannot stand upright. anais mitchell is literally a fucking genius. fuck the 1%. gambling references! the chorus backing him is just so pretty. the way orpheus looks to the chorus for advice and support. "we're standing." ugh its so good.

how long. oh my fucking god. amber fucking gray. (that's it, that's the post). the way she sounds resigned/disappointed when she says "i've had enough" makes me so sad. there are no words to describe how i feel about 0:25 - 0:41. like their relationship is strained, and super mega fucked up, but it's obvious that they still care about one another. the emotion in their voices throughout this song is fantastic. the play on light and dark. also more bird references! how they view themselves/their self importance. hades is a most importantly king. persephone is most importantly a wife. it really show that hades views power as more important than anything else. "nothing comes of the songs people sing." holy fucking shit. cause their song is the "song of love," but they can barely stand each other and their relationship has fallen apart. persephone commenting on his love of power over his love of her. amber's voice during "the earth must die" is so nice and for what? god i love her. they sound so nice together <3

chant (reprise). another favorite hehe. the strings! it's all just so pretty. when the piano comes in i die a little. the self realization coming from the chorus when they're like "oh shit, this is wrong. i don't deserve to be treated like this." is so fucking fantastic. the "young mannn" again! hades really be like "manipulate her! make her depend on you financially! i've been ding this a while kid! i know how to successfully control women!" reeve sounds so pretty pls. the way that eurydice has basically become part of the chorus (since she's just another worker now). more self realization! the different ways that hades and orpheus view the "song of love." "sing before i kill you so i can use it to manipulate my wife and make her feel like shit." patrick's voice tho.

epic iii. reeve coming in with that falsetto like nobody's business. orpheus really about to bite you in the ass with your own damn song. amber gray <3. the "ooo"s in the background. the way the music picks up when reeve gets to the "la"s. it's just so fucking good. that falsetto again. orpheus really looked at the king of hell, a literal god, and said "i want to ruin him psychologically" and it fucking worked. which is some of my favorite irony because hades wouldn't have shit if it weren't for that fact that he's a good manipulator and takes advantage of the needy. that last line <3

epic iii (instrumental). i have no words for how fucking beautiful this is. i so desperately want an extended version. like for real love this so much. if i get married, i want this to be the song for the first dance.

promises. eurydice is so proud of him for finishing. the way that eurydice realized that she cares about him more that material objects. wind and weather references! "if we can do it so can they!" she sounds so excited. :( "hand-in-hand" lol nope. not them refencing wedding song, anyway the wind blows, and then giving their "i do"s. absolutely heart wrenching.

word to the wise. the fates. pls step on me ladies. the lyrics throughout this are so fucking good. lol hades being damned. cause he's the king of hell. honestly its solid advice tho. humans are really fucking stupid.

his kiss, the riot. give us them adjectives king. " how dare people want rights! >:(" hades is really trying to make himself the good guy rn. the music! 2:15 - 3:03 is so good pls. the lyrics are just so spectacular.

wait for me (reprise) (intro). hello again andre! hermes literally says "he's trying to psych you out and manipulate you. he wants you to doubt everything" and orpheus says "are you sure tho?" and then procedes to doubt everything. the way the music changes is <3. the song transition.

wait for me (reprise). my absolute fucking favorite song in this musical. the first fucking lyric is so good. it really sets an expectation for the song and i am not disappointed. lyrics that talk about how fucked up any single person's brain is are so fucking cool to me. god i love this song. how soft the first set of "wait for me"s are. the support/pressure from the chorus. the entire exchange between hades and persephone. the way amber's voice sticks out of the chorus. the fates coming in clutch again. train references! more brain talk! amber gray please end me. eva sounds so pretty. and the final note is so good!

doubt comes in. the long intro that builds up suspense. the first time that orpheus's "la"s aren't echoed by the chorus/music. wind! weather! the fates sound so pretty like always. reeve genuinely sounds so scared. the way the music picks up and the chorus joins in when eurydice starts singing. the music is so unsettling and i love it. god i love his voice. 3:44 - 3:57 always hits so different. you realize just how much she means to him. how it all goes to shit when the music reaches the climax. the fact that the music clashes on purpose. the sadness in their voices.

road to hell (reprise). it all comes full circle. god andre sounds so sad. the way you come to really hear the lyrics because there's no upbeat music to distract you this time, "its a tragedy" lol because the actual written story is a tragedy. "i learned that from a friend of mine" poor orpheus :(. the way the chorus slowly joins in and the music slowly picks up. the "can you feel it" is literally so fucking powerful. fuck yes amber. fuck it up queen. amber and eva sound so nice together. the "its a love song, its a sad song" is so sad. the final lyric is just. ugh.

we raise our cups. yes pls amber. this song is so pretty. good night queen.

[p1harmonyofficial]

[📰] K-Pop Group P1Harmony Is Crossing Boundaries Into The R&B World

By Shirley Ju

As P1Harmony continues their voyage into musical success, they one day aspire to achieve legendary status.

Despite debuting in the midst of a pandemic, P1Harmony is already making strides within the industry and continues to feed their fans with nothing short of bangers.

FNC Entertainment formed the group in 2019 and began teasing their debut in February 2020. With the release of their first EP Disharmony: Stand Out and a movie, P1Harmony has catapulted into the spotlight.

Best known for their performance prowess and ability to dominate a stage, these rookies have been focused on creating a new R&B sound. The group released their highly anticipated second EP Disharmony: Break Out now.

Their title track “Scared” has all the right vibes standing strong as an anthemic banger that blends their soulful singing and hardline rap verses over a glitchy soundscape of punchy beats, lush R&B harmonies, and trippy melody lines.

AllHipHop: As for each member, who is the first R&B artist you looked up to?*

KEEHO: Neyo, Mariah Carey, Solange, John Legend, Alicia Keys, Brandy, Jazmine Sullivan, Ledisi

INTAK: Justin Bieber

JONGSEOB: Kanye West

AllHipHop: For each member, which R&B and hip-hop artists most heavily influenced this EP, and your life?

KEEHO: I get a lot of my inspiration from SZA, Frank Ocean, and Daniel Caesar. I’ve been really into the way they write and create music.

JIUNG: Post Malone, Justin Bieber, & 24kGoldn.

INTAK: A$AP Rocky, EK.

JONGSEOB: J.Cole, Joey Bada$$.

AllHipHop: What sets your guy’s music apart from the rest

KEEHO: I don’t think there’s a specific difference, but we try to add songs that were written or composed by all six members into our albums. There’s a song called “That’s It” from our first debut EP, which was co-written and composed by all of us, and from this new album, we have a song called “If You Call Me,” which was also co-written and composed by all the members as well. I think through this process, we are able to deliver and express the kind of message we want more clearly.

THEO: I personally think what sets us apart is that we have and know the precise message we want to deliver through our music.

JIUNG: I think the way we keep reinterpreting or finding new ways to deliver our message (which has been consistent since the very beginning) is our key appeal.

INTAK: I think what makes us a bit more different is that we are striving to harmonize the world.

SOUL: I think it’s our harmonious, vocal tones and choreography! I think we have a distinct dance style.

JONGSEOB: I think we all have a different way of expressing our thoughts and opinions even if the message or the subject we want to relay is the same. I also think our personal characteristics are strong and different and we also like and listen to different genres of music and that’s what makes us unique.

AllHipHop: Why did you choose the title ‘Disharmony: Break Out’?

KEEHO: It’s a continuation from our first album, which was titled DISHARMONY: STAND OUT. Our message is still based on the idea of ‘disharmony,’ but this time, we wanted to share our message, which is to ‘break out’ from the things that hold us back, our fears, and injustices and be confident enough to create a life that we want, while achieving our goals and dreams.

JIUNG: I think ‘break out’ is the best description of our album’s main theme, which is to ‘break out’ of all the things that you’re tied down to, from people’s judgments, and our fears.

JONGSEOB: Our first album, DISHARMONY: STAND OUT posed questions and pointed out problems, while DISHARMONY: BREAK OUT is about acknowledging these problems, and finding a way to resolve these issues, which is to be confident, ‘break out,’ and become a better person.

AllHipHop: What does it mean to give back to your country through the arts?*

KEEHO: I am so honored and grateful for the opportunity to be a part of this global movement that K-pop is becoming. But then again, to be honest, I also feel a lot of pressure and responsibility. I want to reach out to as many people as I can by making good music and want to show our performances to our fans all across the globe.

THEO: I think it’s a great honor, and I am super proud of it.

JIUNG: I am also proud of K-pop and am grateful for all the support we have been getting. This makes me want to work harder to become an exceptional artist.

INTAK: Being a K-pop artist with the opportunity to help expand K-pop is such an honor, and I am filled with gratitude that I was given this opportunity by my company and all the staff members who are helping us.

SOUL: I am also very proud, and I feel like I was destined to become a K-pop artist [Laughs].

JONGSEOB: I am doing what I’m doing because I wanted to be onstage to perform and write/make music, but it’s so amazing that K-pop is headed towards such a positive direction.

AllHipHop: How did you guys come together?

KEEHO: We were put together for how well we worked together as trainees and for the harmony we created as a team. I think that is also the reason why we are all so close to each other.

AllHipHop: How tight-knit are you guys?

KEEHO: Yes! We are super close. We spend so much time together; we train and see each other every day so I think that’s why we are so close. But above all, we communicate a lot and are like family. I think we are lucky and fortunate that we all get along so well.

THEO: We are REALLY close.

JIUNG: We are SUPER tight-knit

INTAK: We are like family.

SOUL: I think of them as my family in Korea, that’s how close we are.

JONGSEOB: We are close enough to share everything.

AllHipHop: How has debuting in the middle of a pandemic been for you?

KEEHO: Honestly, we didn’t have that much trouble or difficulties. We spent more time training and working on our music since we couldn’t go out. The only thing that was kind of unfavorable was the fact that we didn’t get to see other people and experience things that could have inspired us for our music.

THEO: It was difficult because we couldn’t meet our fans in person.

JIUNG: We didn’t have many difficulties when we were preparing for our debut. The only difficult thing was that we couldn’t perform in front of people.

INTAK: I didn’t experience difficulties

SOUL: I think the pandemic is difficult, but what’s more difficult for me personally is the language barrier!

JONGSEOB: The only thing that is hard to deal with is that we don’t get to see our fans during TV music program shoots or when we are onstage.

AllHipHop: What’s the hardest thing to adjust now that you’re gaining more recognition?

KEEHO: I don’t think there is anything to really adjust right now, and I don’t think I will need to adjust to getting recognized more [Laughs]. I like people and attention! I’m assuming later in our careers; it might get hard when our personal lives diminish, but that too, I don’t think it will be hard for me to adjust. I am very good at adapting!

THEO: I’m OK with getting recognized more, but it’s difficult when they want to see my cutesy stuff in person.

JIUNG: I am a bit worried that I’m not going to have much of a personal life.

INTAK: I don’t have any problems. I think I have already adjusted to this lifestyle! [Laughs].

SOUL: I agree with Intak

JONGSEOB: I have none.

AllHipHop: What can we expect next from the group?

KEEHO: Please continue to show us love and support as we will be releasing a lot of new contents, music, as well as holding more performances.

THEO: I hope to become more at ease when I’m onstage and hope we can grow as one of the more charismatic groups.

JIUNG: I want our fans and everyone to anticipate the amount of energy we will have when we are onstage performing in front of an actual audience.

INTAK: Please look forward to what kind of messages we will be delivering with our music.

SOUL: Please look forward to our future promotional activities with a lot of love and interest!

JONGSEOB: We will become a group that is continuously evolving and excelling in every facet so please look forward to our every move, and we will also continue to release our new message and worldviews.

[dossi-io]

Yugyeom - Point of View (Debut EP) ┃Review

With his debut project Yugyeom takes his first steps under AOMG’s wing but does little to separate himself from the current landscape of K-R&B artists.

The content of this article is also available in video format, embedded at the bottom of this article.

Background

For those of you who are into K-pop, the name Yugyeom will probably be quite familiar. Most got to know him as the main dancer in the incredibly successful group GOT7. In January of this year, the group’s seven year contract with JYP Entertainment ended. No contracts were renewed, which naturally led to the group parting ways with the company. During February, AOMG announced that Jugyeom had signed with the label on social media. This announcement was accompanied by a dance video performance of Yugyeom dancing his ass off to Travis and Thugger’s banger; FRANCHISE.

Now, four months later, he’s not only making his debut as a full on solo artist, but also an AOMG one. Before checking the project out, I was not very familiar with either Yugyeom or GOT7’s music, so I went into this with zero expectations.

Point of View

Point of View is a 7-track EP with a runtime of 24 minutes. The subject matter here revolves around love, but there’s no real substance to the lyrics. The primary focus was obviously the sound and vibe of each track. You can tell that there was some effort put into organizing a tracklist with a varied selection of sounds. You’ll hear a decent mix of tracks ranging from moody and trapsoul inspired music, to ballads and even some party bops.

The project quite clearly shows that Yugyeom is not the strongest vocalist. Both his bright tone and vocal inflections feel rather generic, closely resembling the likes of DEAN or Red House. It can be quite nasally at times, which might bother some, but I didn’t mind it. His performance on the entire project is rather simple, but is decent enough to get the job done.

Tracks

The EP kicks things off with the track “I Want U Around”, featuring DeVita. If you’re a regular listener of modern R&B, you’re bound to have heard similar sounding tracks to this one. It’s your simple, run of the mill, moody trapsoul inspired track. For frequent R&B listeners like me, I find it important to distinguish yourself from the vast sea of talented R&B artists nowadays. While both of them had some decent performances on the track, with DeVita’ vocals obviously stealing the show, there is still a bit of their very own characteristics missing.

I think DeVita was on the right path when she started messing around with harmonies, during the latter part of her verse. She also had a few cool vocal runs going on. My main gripe was that, just as it was beginning to get interesting, her verse got cut off. The track was a solid one, but I’m not too crazy about it. I can however appreciate the importance of this track, in terms of impact on DeVita’s career. This is quite the amazing boost for someone this early on in their career. If you’re interested in learning all about DeVita, I did an in-depth video covering her story. Linked here.

“Running Through The Rain”, is the second track and turned out to be my favorite one. This is one of those tracks that despite Yugyeom not having killer vocals, his vocals are still decent enough to make quite the catchy track. This track had me boppin my head along all throughout it. Despite the extremely dull and bare bone hook, I was still finding enjoyment due to other aspects of the track keeping me engaged. When it comes to the production, GRAY really did his thing here. I think he showcases why he’s been able to remain relevant in the industry for close to a decade now. There’s an expertise to how he keeps the instrumental interesting. It comes down to his beat structure, which combats the simplicity to become noticeably monotonous. The sound selection with it’s blend of trendy synth sounds, guitars and percussion, mixes neatly together with Yugyeom’s vocals. The talkbox vocals really took the track to another level.

“All Your Fault”, is the title track and seems to be a fan favorite. It starts off with some clean strummed guitar hits. Throughout the track, the guitar licks and improvised playing add so much to the complete package. These guitar elements are obviously quite restrained in this pop-format and aim to be more subtle. Yugyeom begins to use a bit more harmonies in the background. Even while simple, they add some much needed qualities to his vocals. Building upon this there’s some well matched set of drums and percussion. The trap hi-hats are mixed very well, making sure not to take focus away from the other elements of the track, which can be a weakness when using busy trap hi-hats. GRAY’s feature on the track added a nice contrast to YUGYEOM. With all of this combined, we have yet another example of a well arranged track.

“All About You”, switches things up with some different energy. The booming 808s and the dancehall inspired drum pattern really begs the listener to get up and move. Having this lively blend of genres and a solid verse from Loco is a great way to vary the energy level of the tracklist. I found the live performance of this song on ELLE STAGE to be quite impressive, due to how closely he sounded to the recorded version.

“Love The Way”, is another fun energetic track bringing the party vibes, produced by Cha Cha Malone. This one just has that sound that will find its way to plenty of summer party playlists. Featuring both punchnello and Jay Park, I’m sure plenty of AOMG fans will mess with this. It’s a cool party record but besides that there’s not much else going on.

“Fallin In Love”, is for sure the weakest track here. I don’t think this type of production from Cha Cha suits Yugyeom that well. It highlights his shortcomings as a vocalist a bit too much, in my opinion.

Why does this not work? Well, on this track Cha Cha provides a very straightforward and super simplistic beat. With such a beat it allows a listener’s utmost focus to be put on the vocals. This works great with an artist who, either has strong vocals, an interesting approach to a track or an interesting tone. You can hear this formula working beautifully on tracks like “Lust” by Hoody, for example. The uninteresting beat and vocals just lead to something a bit too basic and plain, for my tastes. On a positive note though, props for once again adding a track with a different sound to the rest of the tracklist.

The project ends with the track; “When U Fall”. This one didn’t really connect with me, for pretty similar reasons as the previous track. The monotonous nature of the instrumental results in quite a dull and uninspired song. Even the four bars that make up the bridge feel rushed and half-hearted. I can’t feel the passion here, which for me is essential for a convincing love ballad. Instead it just feels too artificial.

Closing thoughts

With this project Yugyeom does little to separate himself from the current landscape of K-R&B artists. I think ‘Point of View’ is a decent EP, and for the most part an enjoyable listen. Knowing his background as a GOT7 member it becomes quite clear that having to carry a track all by himself is a bit awkward. Thankfully the features help out a lot with this issue, besides “Running Through The Rain” the weakest tracks are the ones where he’s by himself.

The writing of the hooks on the project feels very novice, leaving a lot to be desired. Pretty much all of them are basic and repetitive to the point that any listener should have no issue singing along during their initial listen. In combination with these dull hooks, the vocal performances, while passable, can get stale quickly. The tracks that work tend to do so, due to decent beat structure, features or switch-ups to keep things engaging.

Working on his vocals, approach to hooks, and more interesting things going on vocally, like harmonies could go a long way for Yugyeom. Working on these aspects I believe will help him avoid sounding as monotonous as in this EP. According to Jay Park, he’s already working hard on his vocals, which sounds promising.

There’s one important thing to consider regarding this EP. It marks the start of a new chapter in Yugyeom’s career, so most importantly it’s a stepping stone. If he works on his vocals, paired with his amazing talents as a dancer he’ll become a force to be reckoned with.

Listen to the project here https://aomgofficial.lnk.to/PointOfViewU

Thanks for reading or watching this review.

Credits: 

Gif from ‘I Want U Around’ MV: @moxiepoints​

[pinkhyojin]

hoppipolla 💕💕💕

oooooh!! this is a nice starter bc from what i can see their discography isn’t too extensive!

i'm listening to full discographies and writing down my reactions! send an artist if you want!

starting with opfern and about time:

opfern is such a lovely little intro! and GOD i love strings, also is that initial vocal reversed???? that's so neat!!!

about time... this is a MASTERPIECE for real!!! the harmonies come on!!!! the strings solo part makes me feel like i'm in a movie.. also we love a country fade!

okay, time for my husband:

this song totally feels like something that could be played at a wedding, first dance vibes! also i just love the acoustic vibe and the pretty harmonies

their spring to spring - ep is next:

ooooooh in märchen it’s so cool how the song kind of builds up piece by piece!!! i want to see someone dance to this, it just flows so nicely, it would be perfect for a contemporary dance cover! ooooh the guitar solo that comes in like halfway through is so satisfying :))) i like that they have this song to just show off their instrumental skills!

the strings intro in enough makes me feel like i’m standing at the edge of a cliff gazing out at the ocean. oh my god the ending of this song makes me feel so many things wow, it’s so pretty🥲

oh our song is lovely!! it makes me feel very nostalgic for some reason, like it would play in a flashback scene where a main lead is realizing that they’re actually in love with their best friend (i don’t think that’s what the lyrics are saying but it’s just the vibe of the song) omg not the chanting/singing at the end, i’m a sucker for that😭

sorang is such a good closer to this ep! it’s like a warm hug with the harmonies and acoustic sound☺️ also another country fade, nice😎

onto let’s:

ooooh ok! this one is more upbeat! ohh when the beat comes in that’s nice! i love the harmonies in the chorus!! “let’s jump in my car” ok!! road trip vibes!! i feel like this is one that can easily get stuck in someone’s head it’s v catchy

now for their most recent release and then there was us:

ooooh the intro where is sounds so emo and so different from everything else, it reminds me of linkin park almost omg... that was trippy, i liked it!

okay so the love is kind of keeping that newer sound and emo vibe, oh goodness the news part talking about murder?? damn they’re getting deep with the song topics here (not me thinking about where is the love by the black eyed peas while listening to this🥴) oh the ending was interesting! i like how the songs have had that tape sound at the end so far

your ocean is definitely more in line with their older stuff! i keep being being reminded of other songs with this one, there’s just some certain parts that sound like other songs to me🤔 another lovely ballad from them! ooooooh electric guitar????? yeahhhhhhh that’s dope. dudes out here giving us amazing vocals

alright unnatural is nice so far, a lot like some of their other ballads. the backing vocals are pretty in this one

oh gosh, a song called mom. will i cry? we’ll see. the chorus with the falsetto is so pretty!! they really are masters of making songs sound as emotional as possible huh

ooooh love the guitar intro in wander, it has a kind of folk/country vibe to it. oh is this another all instrumental piece? ok yeah i really love the guitar in this, it feels so comforting.. ahhhh the electric guitar!!!!!!! so freakin good wow, love this. it’s such a good decompression tune

oh and then there was us is kinda odd, but i guess it kind of fits as the outro!

okay, now their superband stuff:

i love their wake me up cover it's literally so entertaining ughhhh, and i thought it was so cool how they utilized the cello for the intro!! also their live vocals are just insaneeeee.. the yeehaw is fucking hilarious too. omg i forgot about the amazing guitar solo in this💞

woahhhhh hoppipolla starts out so interesting.. what language is this??? hello strings!! ohhhhhhh electric guitar my beloved!!!!!!💖💖

is someone playing the xylophone in the one more light cover??? these guys pack so much emotion in their voices it's unreal. oh my gosh it's this song??? i may cry... omg the intro to the second verse made me think the song was going electronic all of a sudden lol, but we're good. they just turned the ending around super fast woah

[deobis]

Road to Kingdom Episode 5-6 Thoughts

Alright I have procrastinated so hard on this that the next episode comes out in less than 6 hours LOL It’s okay though because there are only 3 performances to rank so it shouldn’t take too long. 

Enjoyment Ranking:

The Boyz (woo! they’re back at the top haha) x Oneus

TOO x Verivery

Pentagon x ONF

Objective Ranking:

The Boyz x Oneus

Pentagon x ONF

TOO x Verivery

TBZ and Oneus really surprised me this time. I really went in with no expectations because I had no idea what they would do this time. But they really put on a musical for this performance. I love how they slightly altered the meaning of Heroine while keeping the core message in tact. Sunmi herself has said that Heroine is the preface to Gashina and is talking about the ex-lover. She tells the ex-lover to be themselves and continue to go on because they are their own main character, even if she gets hurt in the process. This message is clearly conveyed in TBZxOneus’ version of the song. However, instead of an ex-lover, the hero/heroine is every single trainee out there, whether they make it to debut or not. Sunmi’s Heroine is a very bittersweet song and One Voice really brought out the bittersweetness of trainee life while also managing to send and uplifting message. They changed some of the lyrics but not too much and I thought the bgm arrangement was just enough. It wasn’t overbearing and perfect for their whole vibe. What I loved most was the fact that they used 5 TBZ members and 6 Oneus members. I believe if there were more the performance would not have gone as well. The whole point was to pair them up and put on little musical skits. If they had used more TBZ members it would have been a little overbearing and they wouldn’t be able to put out the little storylines because there wouldn’t be enough screen time for everyone. There are so many little details that you would only be able to notice after watching many times. Let me just list a few:

In the beginning where Sunwoo is writing lyrics, he gets a call. This call is from his parents, which is why he raps his first verse like a conversation (if you listen you will notice his first verse is more ‘spoken’ while his second part is far more like a rap verse). The little phone call detail makes his rap all the more meaningful as it is something he himself has experienced. 

The TV’s in the background are all playing the Heroine MV

Seoho and Chanhee’s part are clearly an audition, the dancers in the chairs represent judges

The song begins to pick up perfectly during Changmin and Hwanwoongs part, they are training and about to debut. This is why Changmin is allowed to smile

Ravin and Juyeon’s part seems seems self explanatory, just backstage before they are about to perform

Now what’s interesting is Chanhee’s next part. I don’t know if any of you noticed but all the clothes the backup dancers hold up are things TBZ has worn at concerts/performances before, this was a super cute touch that only fans who have been following TBZ closely for a long time would notice

Other parts like the part where Sunwoo doesn’t go up on stage seems very obvious so I’ll refrain from talking about that

Anyways there were just so many small details in the entire performance. Plus I believe this was the first performance that heavily focued on vocals rather than dance and surprise factor. Sangyeon’s harmonies were *chefs kiss* and the high notes by Chanhee and Seoho at the end were perfect. 

TOO x Verivery only get second because I liked their performance more than PTG x ONF. The only difference between their stage and BTS’ MV was the fact that it had an army/war theme. The whole mob dance is something BTS does very often. The arrangement wasn’t bad but it also wasn’t memorable. It only picked up for me during the dance break and after that towards the end with the whole flag thing.. it just felt really abrupt and out of place. It was honestly kind of awkward. I know they focused on dance because BTS is well known for their choreographies but I really felt like they could have done more with the entire performance. The camera literally just went around in circles and since they had numbers there were just different formations. I do think it was a good performance and they really brought up the energy that BTS has but idk, it just felt like more could have been done.

Now onto the Kill this Love performance... God where do I start. First of all, I did not like the arrangement one bit. Objectively speaking it was probably the best arrangement of the 3, but I just didn’t like it. Unlike the other two groups, I think they changed it too much. KTL is originally a song empowering people who go through tough breakups (this is clear through Lisa’s first verse and Rose’s second), yet they arranged the song to be a horror/thriller that seemed to revolve around a longing for someone that was lost. The empowerment was erased and idk it just didn’t sit right with me. I also couldn’t really follow the storyline? Like? All I got was that there were women and they were in love but something something things weren’t going well and then something something he still longed for her and tried to hold on but she like disappeared? I know a lot of people liked this performance (the views speak for themselves). I can see the effort and beauty of the performance as well but to me it didn’t do as well as Heroine. 

What I’ve noticed is that shock factor is a big part to the rankings by the groups. This honestly disappoints me because art is not just about surprise factors. Art includes emotion and depth. This might stem from the fact that the forms of art I practiced were piano and ballet, which only reach peak beauty when emotion is poured into it. But I believe these RTK performances should be the same. Anything that can move an audience is a work of art. You don’t need to make people gasp in amazement to make something worth remembering. I know for sure the Heroine performance and PTG’s shine remix will be the performances that stay with me after RTK ends. The fact that Heroine and Shine didn’t do as well proved that emotional performances won’t win you points. This disappoints me since all of them are fellow artists. I’m not surprised at the rankings, but I’m definitely not happy about them either. TBZ and Oneus pulled off a performance that will stay with them for a lifetime so I guess ranking doesn’t matter anyways. 

Whatever I’m salty cya guys in 5 hours for RTK ep 7 😋

[xxbluestrifexx]

Underrated EXO B-sides that need love (in my opinion)

Gravity

- my favorite exo b-side hands down

- the composition of this song is just a work of genius and kudos to whoever made it

- there’s just so many elements and layers to the song that makes it really interesting to listen to!!

- not to mention the vocals (there’s going to be a lot of mentions of vocals in this list)

- the choreography is also really cool because it goes back and forth between powerful movements and then nuanced/graceful movement and it’s just a yes

- stream gravity (off of tempo)

나비소녀 (Don’t Go)

- the bestest ballad that isn’t a ballad

- my second favorite b-side from exo

- came off of their debut album along with other gems such as Black Pearl, Peter Pan, etc. this album was iconic and was super strong in terms of the track list

- gets me into my feels every single time omg

- pre chorus & chorus are my favorites (this is a reoccurring idea too) especially Baekhyun’s part in the first chorus

- the HARMONIES!! ICONIC!! THE HIGH NOTES!! EQUALLY AS ICONIC!!

What U Do?

- the beat of this song is what makes it so iconic

- The War was a disappointing album to a lot of fans so most of its really awesome b-sides were lost to the hate of Kokobop and it’s such a shame :(

- the chorus and after chorus (not quite the second verse but still not really a part of the chorus??) are really awesome especially with that weird noise in the back

- we love EDM (or at least I do)

- anything Chanyeol does in this song is iconic and I love it (his rap + singing in the chorus is the BEST)

- i think my top vocals for this song would be Kai’s or when everybody harmonizes

- best part is the after-bridge chorus when it’s just straight clapping and talented vocals

Baby You Are

- my fav song off the obsession album

- needs more love 100%

- the acoustics that then fade into synths during the chorus and come back during the verses?? so fcking cool

- I also like how the chorus is all the members singing, like that’s really dope bc they all sound good singing together

- favorite vocals of this song are Baekhyun and Jongdae, especially their harmony in the second verse

- it’s just a chill and vibey song that you can rock out to and I appreciate that

TACTIX

- definitely the best hype song off of this list

- I love EXO’s Japanese album- I probably listen to it daily

- another song with a crazy iconic beat that makes you want to get up and dance

- favorite parts are the pre-chorus and chorus, even if the chorus is very EDM- style and almost is non vocal but still has vocals

- but those parts are just really hype and fun to listen to

- favorite vocals are definitely Xiumin & Suho’s, along with Kai (kai’s prechorus is the best part of the entire song fight me)

- xiumin’s bridge & Baekhyun’s high notes are also just as amazing and deserve just as much love

- stream EXO’s Japanese album cowards all the songs are bops

Heaven

- THE V O C A L S

- Kai & Jongdae take the cake for this song, I just love how smooth and velvety both their voices are during this song

- Baekhyun’s chorus and Kyungsoo’s bridge are my favorite points of this song because they build the character of the song

- not to mention Chanyeol wrote Heaven about/for Baekhyun (chanbaek at its finest)

- regardless the lyrics and song are really cute and I love it

Ka-CHING!

- I had to include a CBX song or this list wouldn’t be complete I’m not sorry

- another iconic Japanese song from EXO’s talented vocalists

- this song is funny and lighthearted, it really makes me laugh and dance (it’s embarassing)

- it’s just quirky and thats why it’s iconic

- the prechorus & the vocal parts of the chorus are a total 180 flip from the rest of the song and convey the power behind all the vocals

- the choreo for this song is equally as funky and fun as the song is and I just love it a lot

백색소음 White Noise

- another funky exo song with a cool beat and composition

- a very different side of their music that I was pleasantly surprised by

- Jongdae & Kyungsoo win for vocals- Jongdae’s chorus, plus all the adlibs that all the vocalists do really gave this song it’s character

- just a chill song to vibe with I loved it a lot

credits to all gif owners!!

[matpisound]

matpi’s 2020 top ten

With this crazy year finally being thrown to the wolves, I thought I’d share some of my favorite songs. Usually I rank songs based on my mood, but I thought long and hard about this list to make it as accurate to my tastes as possible. In addition to the musical elements, I’ve also considered my personal experience with each song. With that said, get ready for a list that defines the phrase, “all over the place.”

10. ”約束” - Roselia

Translating to “Promise,” this Roselia song rounds out the list with its dynamic highs and lows and metric complexities. Combine that with Roselia’s signature sound and you have yourself a straight up banger. There are a lot of feel changes, with sections of 3 against 4 polymeter, steady rock groves, and a double time chorus, and this keeps the song interesting and super fun to listen to. Not to mention the powerful lead vocals, courtesy of Yukina Minato, played by the insanely talented Aina Aiba, as well as the occasional trading of vocal lines with bassist Lisa Imai, voiced by Yuki Nakashima, allow the song to really shine.

Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQS0LZfXRCs&list=OLAK5uy_l6KyKKWX1j8vHY-PjK6yJHkIZpOV0WMrE

9. “Avant-garde HISTORY” - Roselia

Going up the list now we have another Roselia song. This song is marked by its progressive rock influence in the intro, with a lack of adherence to a single key or time signature, all while remaining an epic intro to the majestic 6/8 rock ballad that follows. Combining rock with orchestral elements is a recipe for greatness, and Roselia really pulled through here. The lead vocals are supported by a chorus of the other members in a really significant way in this song, contributing even more to the sheer glory that it exudes. Add in some huge drum fills and epic buildups between sections, and it creates this absolute work of art.

Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nakW_Ziciik&list=OLAK5uy_lImYujueVzq7DDMrRc2TX8qnp1ZzMlHKM&index=6

8. “Ride” - Samuel R. Hazo

No, this is not the twenty one pilots song, nor is it a cover. It’s a wind ensemble piece chock full of the good stuff. Spicy harmonies, giant fanfares, fast runs, solos, time signature changes, heavy yet tasteful use of percussion, what’s not to love? I really wanna play this in band one day, because aside from being fun to listen to, it’s a real challenge to play, especially with a large ensemble. Wind ensemble pieces in general are really cool because they are light-years ahead of most modern music in terms of dynamic contrast, and "Ride” has a ton of it.

Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au4geHy_S_0

7. “Amaryllis” -  Shinedown

I honestly don’t know how to describe why I like this song so much; I just do. It’s a really nice song. The amaryllis as a flower is extremely beautiful, sporting vivid reds and pinks in its petals, and that imagery really shone through with its lyrics and 6/8 ballad feel. I’d like to mention the key signature as well. The key of D♭ just feels like a beautiful key signature, and here that beauty was thoroughly reflected.

Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixltBz9IENw

6. “FIRE BIRD” - Roselia

Back again with another Roselia song. First of all, this song is great because of the story of the Phoenix. I always thought an immortal bird of fire rising from the ashes was such a glorious thing, and this song captures the essence of this tale perfectly. A quiet start with just piano and vocals gives way to a ginormous sounding intro as all the band members sing as a choir, which then leads into a crazy double-time groove which persists throughout the song. Combine that with Roselia’s sound and you get a triumphant anthem that’s sure to energize anyone and anything.

Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_F7l7n_oP8&list=OLAK5uy_lImYujueVzq7DDMrRc2TX8qnp1ZzMlHKM&index=4

and here’s a live version because the visuals are IMMACULATE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AwP7S9f3A8

5. “Guilty All The Same” - Linkin Park

Off of one of the greatest rock albums in my opinion, “Guilty All The Same” is nothing short of a masterpiece. A nearly 6-minute song, and it’s never boring for a second. The unique drum grooves and use of 3 against 4 polymeter are what make this song so damn interesting to listen to, and lead singer, Chester Bennington’s, vocals are nothing short of spectacular. Rakim’s verse in the bridge combined with the sick guitar riff and the drums backing them up makes it one of the best combinations of rock and rap that I’ve heard.

Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEaEdLQbAFM

4. “LOUDER” - Roselia

This being one of the first Roselia songs I’ve listened to, it has a really special place in my heart. But musically, it’s super awesome too. At a blistering 195 BPM, it’s one of the fastest songs on here, meaning it’s also super fun to play on the drums. It also changes keys between the verses and choruses from D minor to D major and back. And of course, who could forget lead vocalist Yukina Minato guiding the song through her soaring melodic lines. All in all, it’s a great song that managed to top my Spotify Wrapped.

Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYSXZQ2b1-c

Now before we get into our top 3, let’s look at some honorable mentions:

“A DECLARATION OF ×××” - RAISE A SUILEN: A song inciting revolution, this combination of rock and EDM is a straight up vibe. We also get some djent as a bonus! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=713nCe8LLa0

“DIVE!” - Setsuna Yuki: Rock music in the world of anime idols is a foreign concept, and to me it’s a welcome one. It seems, however, that others disagree... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXXxW8hEF3o

“Neo-Aspect” - Roselia: I swear this is the last Roselia song, but it was way too good not to include here. A powerful song filled to the brim with expression. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snp_DT9EqiQ

“カレンデュラ“ - RONDO: “Calendula” for those who can’t read Japanese, this heavy song carries a lot of weight in it’s lyrics as well. Overall a really epic song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRnaYwx2fH4

“Daybreaker” - Waterflame: Made fairly recently by a producer who made music that was a huge part of my childhood, this song just vibes so fucking hard. Fun fact: it was released on my birthday! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLomCDE7E50

3. “Transcendent Journey” - Rossano Galante

Now we’re talking about the true bangers of my music taste. I love Galante’s music because it’s always so dynamic always with super melodious lead parts. This piece is no different in that sense. It really feels like a journey. Fast woodwind runs supporting soaring brass lines, quiet woodwind melodies, blazing fanfares, and varied tempo make this piece of music really feel like a spiritual journey. There’s so much about this piece that I just can’t put into words so you just have to listen for yourself.

Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuMi2z2F3io

2. “Nostalgia” - Rossano Galante

Another wind ensemble piece making the top 3? Well, aside from being a beautiful piece musically, it brings a lot of good memories for me personally as well. We played this for my band’s spring concert when I was in 8th grade. As 8th graders, our ensemble included the high school band students as well, and that was the year one of my favorite seniors was graduating. He was such a big role model for me, and the entire concert was extremely emotional. This was my favorite piece we had programmed that night, and it’s made its way into my favorite songs of all time.

Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qaq_WKsatg

1. “The Catalyst” - Linkin Park

This was one of those songs. You know those songs that you fall in love with as soon as you hear it for the first time? Yeah, this was that. With every listen, I only liked it more and more, and it crawled its way to the top. It starts off soft, but it just keeps building. Everything builds and builds and becomes increasingly chaotic until it all collapses in the second half of the song. From there, the repeated lyrics “Lift me up, let me go” carry this song to its epic finale, in which we feel the culmination of all that chaos from earlier. Not only does the song work so well as a standalone track, its use as the penultimate track on “A Thousand Suns” (my favorite album of all time) serves as the final climax before resolving the intricate story weaved by the album. This is a perfect song if I have ever heard one.

Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sBjZBn3DQU

Well, folks, there you have it. A playlist of the best songs that got me through this forsaken year and will hopefully empower the next. I wish you all a better and happy 2021, and I’ll catch you at the double barline!

[cirrus-lily]

my first listen of resonance pt. 1!

i wanted to start doing these since i’m very interested in music and stuff and i wanna learn how to properly express musical things etc. etc. so yea!! feel free to ignore and these are just my opinions, so pls don’t come @ me thanks :)

track 1: make a wish (birthday song) - nct u (ft. taeyong, doyoung, jaehyun, lucas, xiaojun, jaemin, shotaro)

i actually really liked this, if we’re talking purely about the music (the mv is another thing....i won’t talk about that). the music was interesting all the way through and was full of unexpected twists. all the members did so well!!! but the members that really stood out to me in the mv and also just listening to the song were jaemin and xiaojun! they did so well and they nailed their parts so well!!! there’s just something very satisfying about jaemin’s rap in this song, and all of xiaojun’s parts suited him really well and it was nice to see him sing in a style that was different to the typical wayv style. also rapper jaehyun!!! his parts suited him so well and i’m so happy we got to see him do a rap-esque part hehe :) the only part i probably didn’t like was the part where there was that time-warp effect before the final chorus like that felt so out of place ... why is it there?? also where’s shotaro tho?? like i didn’t even hear him,,, if you’re gonna add a new member at least use him sm :/ | okay so i just watched the line distribution and jaemin has so little lines :((( shotaro doesn’t have many solo parts but has a lot of adlibs and honestly? good for him!! it’s really good for a debut!! doyong and lucas should’ve had more lines too :/ anyways overall i really love this song and i’m so excited to see the stages!!!

track 2: misfit - nct u (ft. johnny, taeyong, mark, hendery, jeno, yangyang, sungchan)

this is legit my favourite song so far it’s incredible!! when the song started i just started full-on vibing!! this song is so fun and has so much energy and i had no expectations at first but the track video blew me away, which made me so excited to hear the full song, and it did not disappoint :) everyone in this song SLAYED. i have nothing else to say except that because the raps were fire and each member pulled their verse off so well it continued to make me smile line after line after line. for sungchan’s debut, it was incredible to hear him spit fire like that and i am so excited to see how he grows as a rapper if he’s already this good at debut oh gosh. but my favourite part has to be mark’s second verse where the music cuts out and he keeps going and his rhythm actually speeds up once the music cuts. that blew my mind in the track video and still has the same effect on me listening to it again. the genius of cutting out the music is incredible and it adds so much not just to the rap but to the song overall. my only complaint for this song is that johnny got like...4 lines. cmon sm please give him lines he’s more than just a visual!! overall this song is something i really enjoyed and something that the members pulled off so well even though it’s so different and unexpected from nct :)

track 3: volcano - nct u (ft. taeyong, doyoung, jaehyun, winwin, jungwoo, lucas, mark) (aka nct 2018 boss unit)

what is going on in this song......at the beginning it gave me similar vibes to limitless but as i listened to more of the song, it kinda fell apart for me ;-; like the vocal parts were really good (jaehyun high note!!) and the rap parts were really good but they didn’t flow together as well as they should have, and it ended up feeling as if i was listening to the rap of one song and the vocals of another song :/ also where are sicheng’s parts?? i thought i just didn’t hear him but when i went to check all he has is like...2-3 adlibs?? why is he even in the song then it doesn’t even have choreo?? feels like boss all over again rip sicheng :’( 

track 4: light bulb - nct u (ft. taeyong, kun, doyoung, and sungchan)

wow this song...i was very fascinated by the member lineup at first, and then i heard the song and it all makes sense :) everything melds so well together, with ty and sungchan’s rapping pairing perfectly with kun and dy’s vocals, and there are kinda ‘pairs’? like ty and dy and sungchan and kun,, and their voices compliment each other so well aaaaaaa. the only part i felt weird about was the start when ty was rapping over the piano...the rhythm clashed a little but as the song went on it resolved itself thankfully. the vibes reminded me of yestoday and it’s a very different mood from the first 3 songs on the album so i’m kinda confused as to why they’ve put it as track 4 but oh well. sungchan showcased a different side of his rapping here and he’s really beginning to show himself as a very well rounded rapper so i’m actually super impressed but as expected from nct :) my favourite thing about this song has to be kun’s vocals tho. the first time you hear him in the song is when he harmonises with doyong and i tell you the way i Lost It. and every time he sang as sungchan rapped it blew my mind. and doyong and kun’s harmonies,,,, chef’s kiss. can you tell i really love this song aaaaaa okay end of ramble. i think overall i just really appreciate the change in pace of the album since the first 3 were very hype lol.

track 5: dancing in the rain - nct u (ft. taeil, johnny, yuta, kun, jaehyun, jungwoo, xiaojun, chenle)

ok this song blew my mind 🤯 firstly, can we talk about jaehyun and johnny rapping??????? i’m so happy that we got to hear them rap!! it was so beautiful :’) secondly, vocal kings!!! chenle high note!!  their voices sound so beautiful together and i’m so happy we got that in this song!! the vibes are also so pretty?? like a lofi jazzy vibe and honestly it feels like singin’ in the rain modern version and i am living :) the only minor issue i have is that because there are so many vocalists in the unit, some of them had really few lines :/ but i think they needed more people to create that effect in the chorus of a lot of people harmonising together, so we gain some we lose some i guess,, but wow i love this song so much can someone write a fic or make an mv based on this song pleaseeeeeeee i would love to see it :’) p.s. i listened to this song twice once on spotify and once on colour-coded lyrics (just to see who sang what) and the more i listen to it the more i love this song aaaaaaaaaa :)

track 6: interlude: past to present

ok this was interesting...i was so confused about the first part cos i couldn’t make sense of what was being narrated, but the second part is another story,,, it’s chock full of references - like there’s that one sound (idk how to describe it) but it’s in both the awaken the world interlude and the neo zone interlude, and the part after that is reminiscent of the punch intro thing...which is why it’s so interesting,,, would the theorists like to have a go? but honestly it was very interesting musically and very nct lmao...i have nothing left to say lol that’s it.

track 7: déjà vu - nct dream (OT7)

wow the vibes on this song are so fun!! this song really suits dream and i think it’s a fitting return for ot7 :) it’s got the playfulness of we go up with a bit more maturity which is very representative of dream’s current phase where they’re growing up but they’re still kids hehe :) i will complain about the line distribution again except everyone’s probably sick of hearing about it lol...but mark has a lot of lines and jeno and jaemin don’t sigh. the line distribution for the vocalists was really quite fair tho :) also renjun bridge!!!! it was so good!!! and haechan intro!!!! wow i love this song so much heh but my favourite part has to be the bgm,, like the dang dang sound that was in the bgm for the entire track really helps to push the song forward and adds a spring to the song that really makes it more playful and fun!! i’m super impressed by this as well since the track video didn’t make me that excited but now i really like it so i think this song was so fun :)

track 8: nectar - wayv (OT7)

let’s formally welcome nectar to the list of nct’s hoe anthems 😌 okay but that aside, i quite liked the song!! the intro was weird but once you get into the song it’s pretty okay!! it’s also slightly different from the wayv sound we’re used to but the members pulled it off well!! i love the bgm too hehe :) ten and sicheng!! i can finally hear them!! and it was so nice to hear them both sing aaaa. also wayv’s vocal line continue to astonish me...that’s the highest i’ve heard kun and dejun sing and it sound so good!!! the rap was fire too and lucas, yangyang and hendery have done it again, they sound so swag which really fits the vibe of the song!! i also love how most of the song is pretty low and starts pretty low but the vocals are such a complete contrast cos they’re so high and that really adds to the song!! i’m so wayv biased but i genuinely really do like this song and ‘gimme that nectar’ will be stuck in my head for the next 24 hours :/

track 9: music, dance - nct 127 (OT9)

this track is so hype 😳 and i enjoyed that so much!! what stood out to me more than anything else in this song was the bgm, and i love how they cut the music, yell “drop that beat!” and then the beat actually drops 🤯 also the bridge,,, a masterpiece...i thought we were gonna get a solid high note and the airy high note comes from nowhere and suddenly i’m so stunned 😳 also this album really is the return of rapper jaehyun huh :) it’s so nice to hear him rap again :) and this song is really satisfying in so many ways, like the rhythm is really good and the bass hits deep and the dance break music thing was so well timed and so well produced and oooooooh i like this track more than i expected :)) oh and ‘music, dance’ will be stuck in my head for the next 24 hours with ‘gimme that nectar’ :/

track 10: faded in my last song - nct u (ft. taeil, johnny, yuta, ten, lucas, renjun, haechan, jisung)

the way i was trying not to SCREAM throughout this song :’) IT’S SO BEAUTIFUL AAAAAA i mean it in the best way possible when i say this could be an ost it’s so beautiful :’) the VOCALS i nearly lost it when ten sang the pre chorus then nearly lost it when renjun sang the second pre chorus and then almost completely lost it during the bridge (especially cos haechan and taeil) holy moly that was a journey :’) also johnny and yuta’s rap style and lucas’ lower tone really fit so well with the song, like it didn’t take away from the sad vibes of the song but it added to the mellowness of the overall song. and can we just take a moment to talk about park jisung’s rap??? it was so short but he nailed it!!!! this entire song was a masterpiece because all their voices fit perfectly together and complement each other so well it just makes this song shine in a different way??? i have so many things that i wanna say about this song but i’m internally screaming so i’m basically incoherent lol. one thing i will say though is the bgm is so pretty and the piano is so nice :’) (also p.s. idk why but this song lowkey gives me got7 vibes but in the best way possible)

track 11: from home - nct u (ft. taeil, yuta, kun, doyoung, renjun, haechan, chenle)

i’m crying........i’m actually crying.....can they not come for me like this..........this song is so beautiful o m g :”) hearing them sing in their native languages about home is so moving?? like it hits a spot and suddenly my eyes are sweating :”) and the way that the transition from one language to another is so smooth and seamless?? like renjun and chenle are singing in chinese and suddenly yuta pops in with a line of japanese and i completely lost it lmaoooooo. and the way they all come together in the bridge is so beautiful, and taeil’s high note after!!!! and the bgm of this song suited it so well, it allowed you to focus on the vocals and still adds to the overall mood and atmosphere of the song, plus at the start it’s a bit muffled out as if it’s being played on an old record and then it becomes unmuffled and the sound is so bright :) and the way that this song sounds a little bittersweet?? i swear when the mv comes out and when i read the translations i will cry even more i’m not even ready and we still have a week to go. this was the song i was looking forward to most and honestly? it didn’t disappoint at all :)

track 12: from home | korean version - nct u (ft. taeil, yuta, kun, doyoung, renjun, haechan, chenle)

it’s just as beautiful, but with less tears lol :) there isn’t really much to say, it still flows just as well in korean as it did in 3 languages, so i think sm just wanted there to be a version that was completely in korean since nct are a korean group lol.

track 13: make a wish (birthday song) | english version - nct u (ft. taeyong, doyoung, jaehyun, lucas, xiaojun, jaemin, shotaro)

well this is interesting....the english version of the song sounds a bit like a hoe anthem (only a bit!!!) so i’m curious about the lyrics to the korean version o_O also i find it a little strange how they say ‘i can do this all day’ in the korean version but say ‘i can do this all night’ in the english version,,, like what’s the difference?? i literally don’t know why they did that but oh well :) still a great song hehe :)

overall, it’s a really interesting album!! it’s a little different from what i expected, but i still really love it!! i think the songs will grow onto me more as i listen to the album more, so yea :))

[grimelords]

October Playlist

My October playlist is finished and it’s complete from Rico Nasty to Rachmaninoff. I absolutely guarantee there’s something you’ll love in this 3 and a half hours of music, and probably something you’ll hate too! Something for everyone!

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Santeria - Pusha T: In anticipation of Jesus Is King I relistened to the entire Wyoming Sessions project a few times, and a year removed from all the hype and controversy here's the thing: it's fucking great. The individual albums ranged pretty widely in quality and felt slightly unfinished for how short they were sometimes, but taking the project as a whole 5-album 120 minute playlist it turns out it's a masterpiece. My personal tracklist goes Ye/Daytona/Nasir/KTSE/Kids See Ghosts, which isn't release order but I think makes it flow the best - both Kanye albums bookending it and the less impactful Nas and Teyana Taylor albums buried a bit further in where you can appreciate them now that you're deep in the mindset of the whole thing rather than alone on their own.

Puppets (Succession Remix) - Pusha T & Nicholas Brittel: This remix is such a perfect match: Pusha T’s corporate villainy finally given a context and prestige it deserves. It’s also short enough that it could feasible be the actual theme song next season, which would be a marked improvement imo.

Use This Gospel - Kanye West, Clipse & Kenny G: I am and remain a Kanye stan, even after everything. It’s nice to see him going back to the extremely uneven mastering of MBDTF era, it’s a sound that is uniquely his and it’s fun to see him revisit it. The thick vocoder harmony is so soupy you get lost in it, and the way it opens up to include the full choir in the No Malice verse is beautiful. Kanye reunited Clipse through Christ and we have Him to thank for that at least. The Kenny G break is great, and the grain and dirt on the whole track when the beat kicks in is so gritty you can feel it.

Man Of The Year - Schoolboy Q: I didn't love the Chromatics album they surprise released but it did thankfully remind me of the time Schoolboy Q sampled Cherry for Man Of The Year. Taken exclusively on lyrics, Man Of The Year is a triumph: he's the man of the year and it's all worked out but the sample and the beat underscores the dead eyed melancholy that runs through the whole of Oxymoron of never winning even when you've won.

Cold - Rico Nasty: This song fucking tears your face off. Imagine STARTING your album at this level of intensity. She just goes straight to 100 and burns the house down. Outside of Lil John so few rappers can get away with just straight up screaming in the adlibs but the way she just lung tearingly screams GOOOO through this is fucking sick.

Fake ID - Riton & Kah-Lo: TikTok songs are becoming their own genre, but it’s a very nebulous sort of a mood encompassing everything from aughts pop punk hooks to skipping rope raps like this. It’s a strange new way for songs to blow up that everyone seems compelled to write articles about but my take on it is it’s exactly the same as ads were in the old days. Remember how many songs did absolute numbers because someone put it in a Motorola ad? Same thing except you’re not being sold a phone this time, so in some ways it’s better. Anyway, this song bangs. The spirit of 212 era Azealia Banks lives on even if she’s doing her best ever since then to kill it.

Doctor Pressure - MYLO & Miami Sound Machine: There was a very good era in the mid-2000s where you could just put mashups out as singles and they’d chart, it was sick. My only two examples are this and Destination Calabria but I’m sure there’s more. Drop The Pressure is a masterpiece but as an alternate version this mashup is equally masterful.  

If You’re Tarzan, I’m Jane - Martika: Martika is unfortunately best known for the 1989 one hit wonder Toy Soldiers, a sort of boring overdramatic ballad which is best known for being sampled by Eminem in 2004 in his quite bad super duper serious song Like Toy Soldiers. I say unfortunately because every other song on her first album is great, it’s all hypercolour 80s synthpop and I love this song especially because it is so completely stuffed with activity it becomes dizzying. It gets so lost in itself that they completely abandon the dramatic pause before “I’m Jane” for some reason toward the end and instead just layer three different tracks of vocal adlibs. Every part of this song is great, the weird ‘o we o we o’ chant before the second verse? The neighing horse guitar before the bridge? The musical tour of the world IN the bridge? The part where she says ‘I want to swing on your vine?’. This song has everything.

You Got Me Into This - Martika: Every part of the instrumentation in this is amazing. The bass sound, the main synth, the extremely athletic brass, the wonderful echoing 80s snare that’s as big as a house. I just love it. She also does some really intriguing slurs on the word ‘love’ all the way through, just moving it around absolutely anywhere.

Space Time Motion - Jennifer Vanilla: I love when someone has such a clearly defined aesthetic and mission from the very beginning. Jennifer Vanilla is the alter ego of Becca Kaufmann from Ava Luna who I've had in this playlist before but never competely investigated. Jennifer Vanilla feels like an episode of Sex And The City where Samantha gets really into Laurie Anderson and she is incredible. This video is the best mission statement I’ve ever seen and is currently criminally underviewed so please do your part and support the Jennifer cause by watching these two videos.

So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings - Caroline Polachek: Caroline Polachek said watch me write a Haim song and did it. Apparently the very early versions of this album started when she was in writing sessions for Katy Perry, but then it started to turn into something else and she took it for herself, and I think you can hear that. With more normal production and a little faster this is a hundred percent a Katy Perry song, but instead it’s completely uniquely Caroline Polachek and it’s all the better for it. And also Katy Perry must be furious because her new songs are simply not good at all.

Electric Blue - Arcade Fire: I just love the obsession of this song in the outro, chanting over and over and over “Cover my eyes electric blue, every single night I dream about you”

Promiscuous - Nelly Furtado and Timbaland: I got a youtube ad for one of those Masterclass videos the other day and it was Timbaland teaching production. This ad went for five minutes for some reason and I watched the whole thing and it made me admire Timbaland even more. He’s demonstrating his compositional technique which is basically to just beatbox, and then loop it, and then add some extra percussion layers with more beatboxing and hand percussion, then loop that and add a little melody by singing or humming. ‘It’s that simple’ he says. Then later he goes back in and puts in actual drums or synths or whatever. I was stunned because suddenly a lot of his music makes sense. Without the barrier of instrument or timbre to get hung up on it allows him to write from this instantly head-nodding place of just making up a little beat you can sing and dance to immediately. Listening to a lot of his music now you can hear the bones underneath everything so clearly, all his beats are supremely beatboxable and all his melodies are very hummable, they’ve never overcomplicated by instrumental skill or habits, they just exist to serve the song.

Serpent - TNGHT:  TNGHT are back baby and this song is like nothing I’ve ever heard before. It feels like afrofuturist footwork from another dimension, the mbira sounding lead against the oil drum percussion in this cacophony of yelps and screams that just builds to an irrepressible energy without a bassline in sight.

Ghosts Of My Life - Rufige Kru: I'm reading Mark Fisher's Ghosts Of My Life right now and some good person has put together a spotify playlist of all the songs he mentions. He has a whole essay about why this song is sick so I’m not going to go into it here but it’s interesting to hear about someone growing up with jungle when it’s a genre that has always felt very niche to me. I guess partly as a result of it never really making it mainstream as a genre here, and also me being a little too young for it.

Renegade Snares - Omni Trio: My biggest introduction to drum and bass comes from the game Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition and this really great song from the soundtrack that is finally on spotify after a very long absence. At almost the exact same time as I discovered this song with its spacious piano and repitched snares, I discovered Venetian Snares and breakcore in general. Having no particular frame of reference for breakcore as an offshoot of drum and bass only amplified its appeal to me as a completely alien genre that sounded like nothing else I’d ever heard, and so my personal history with drum and bass is a story of walking backwards into it after the fact which is interesting if not helpful.

Punching In A Dream - The Naked And Famous: The Mark Fisher book also mentions the Tricky song which I’ve never heard from which The Naked And Famous got their name and I thought ‘man remember The Naked And Famous, they were sick?’. The sort of harder edged Passion Pit instrumentation mixed with pop punk, a winning combination.

Vegas - Polica: My favourite part of this song is the unexpected blastbeats after the chorus, using their two drummers to their full advantage and just shaking the song by its foundations every now and then lest you get too comfortable.

Right Words - Cults: I’m beginning to suspect I may be the last surviving Cults stan but if this be my lot I’ll gladly do it

Running From The Sun - Chromatics: The new Chromatics album got me to relisten to their definitive document Kill For Love, and something new I appreciated this time about an album I love a lot is its length. Kill For Love is almost 80 minutes long and it luxuriates in that length. It’s sequenced perfectly so it never feels like it’s long for no reason, but large chunks just completely space out and go out of focus in the soft neon light and the second half of this song is a good example. The whole thing just evaporates into smoke and it feels perfect. If this were a shorter and more concise song that had a proper ending it wouldn’t feel right, this whole album has no straight edges at all and it’s all the better for it.

Chance - Angel Olsen: I cannot belive this song. This feels like she wrote her own version of My Way looking forward instead of back. Instead of the ruefully triumphant "I've lived a life that's full / I've traveled each and every highway" it's “I don't want it all / I've had enough / I don't want it all / I've had a love." before the turn from the future to the present at the end, where she gives up on a forever love in exchange for right now. I love how raw this vocal take feels. It's not her best voice but it feels very very honest as a result. She's just singing her heart out in this huge showstopping closer. In an interview she said "I didn’t love the recording of it very much, and now I just feel in love with it as a closing statement, because it’s a way of saying, ‘Look, I have hope for the next thing in my life.’ I’m not going to anticipate negativity or hate or an end. But instead of us looking towards forever, why don’t we just work on right now?"

Something To Believe - Weyes Blood: This album just keeps paying dividends. I’m systematically going through long obsessive periods with every single song on it and now it’s Something To Believe’s turn.

Don’t Shut Me Up (Politely) - Brigid Mae Power: Without meaning to, Brigid Mae Power seems to have created some incredible fusion of folk music and stoner metal. The way this song absolutely sits unmoving on one deep and resonant chord for so long is amazing. When it does change chords it feels like a full body effort to get up and shift. She has a similar feeling to Emma Ruth Rundle, who more explicitly wears her metal influences, but Brigid Mae Powers' strength is in how much it resembles the traditional folk side of the spectrum. Her voice is also amazing, with the huge effortless runs she goes on about halfway through just coming unmoored from the song completely and floating off into space.

Sweetheart I Ain’t Your Christ - Josh T. Pearson: I had a real problem with Josh T. Pearson for a long time because of how he presents as so authentic on this album, and as I’ve previously discussed in these playlists the concept of authenticity in country music is a source of neverending anguish for me. But his newest album The Straight Hits! has largely cured that for me because it’s not good at all, is extremely contrived (all the song titles have the word ‘hit’ in them) and he’s shaved his beard and replaced it with one of the worst irony moustaches I’ve ever seen. So now I’m free to enjoy The Last Of The Country Gentlemen as a character construction, which allows me a far deeper and truer engagement than the idea of a man actually living and thinking like this which is frankly a little embarrassing.

Codeine Dream - Colter Wall: I love this song, it has that feeling that great folk songs do of feeling like you’ve always known it. The strongest moments on this Colter Wall album to me are in songs like this that chase this particular feeling of morose isolation, and where he leans away from storytelling like his biggest hit Kate McCannon - a kind of cliche country murder ballad. This song is fantastic because of the way it wallows in this black depression not as a low point, but as a reprieve from the lower previous point. Things are as bad as they get now, and they’re always going to be like this, but at least I don’t dream of you anymore.

Motorcycle - Colter Wall: I only just found out about Colter Wall this month and have been listening to this album over and over. When I first heard him I though it was strange I'd never heard of him before because he's obviously some old country veteran based off his voice, but it turns out he's 24 and this is his first album he just sings like he ate a cigar. I love this song especially because it's so straighforward. It's a simple and supremely relatable mood: what if I bought a motorbike and fucking died.

Who By Fire - Leonard Cohen: I watched American Animals a couple of weeks ago and it’s a great movie, highly recommended. This song plays near the end and I waited for the credits to find out what this great song was, and like a rube found out it’s only one of the most celebrated songwriters of all time. I’ve never had much of a Leonard Cohen phase, somehow. In my mind I always get him mixed up with Lou Reed, which I’m learning is actually way off. I love the harmony vocals in this, and the way they move around into the shadows in the ‘who shall I say is calling’ parts.

Words From The Executioner To Alexander Pearce - The Drones: Alexander Pearce was a convict who escaped Sarah Island’s penal settlement in Tasmania with seven other convicts in 1822. He was recaptured two months later alone. In 1823 he re-escaped with a fellow convict, Thomas Cox and again was returned alone.He was executed by hanging later having eaten six men during his escape attempts.

It Ain’t All Flowers - Sturgill Simpson: I found this album going through the Pichfork 200 albums of the decade list and I feel like a fool for not having heard it sooner because now I am completely obsessed. Sturgill Simpson is doing the very best work in country music right now because he's looking backwards with one eye and forwards with the other and this song is a great illustration: a perfect Hank Williams Jr type country song with big voiced hollers that morphs into a surprise psych freakout for the whole second half.

Desolation Row (Take 1, Alternate Take) - Bob Dylan: I’ve always liked Desolation Row a lot as a song but the acoustic guitar on the album version is simply not good, it's just kind of mindlessly playing this long directionless solo the whole time and over the course of a song this long it really adds up to just being annoying. Luckily because it’s a Bob Dylan song there’s a whole universe of alternate takes and mixes and this is a great pared down version I found without it. The best kind of Bob Dylan songs are the ones where he just makes an endless stream of allusions and bizzare imagery, and this and Bob Dylan's 115th Dream are my favourite examples of it.

Living On Credit Blues - El Ten Eleven: This is a groove I get stuck in my head a lot, and this is also a song I think would work well as a theme for a tv show. I've been meaning to do a 30 second edit of it just for my own amusement, maybe I'll do that soon. El Ten Eleven are a duo where one guy plays drums and one guys plays a double necked guitar/bass and looping pedals and somehow against all the odds of that description they manage to make emotional, driving instrumental music of very deep feeling, like this song which is one of my all time favourites.

Dusty Flourescent/Wooden Shelves - Talkdemonic: This is sort of a companion Living On Credit Blues, and Talkdemonic are similarly an instrumental duo with good drums. This entire album from 2005 is highly recommended, it's a sort of halfway between the post rock of the time and a kind of acoustic hiphop instrumentals that ends up sounding very rustic and homemade, like a soudtrack for a winter cabin.

Turnstile Blues - Autolux: This is a perfect song, built around a perfect beat. Every part just fits perfectly.

Fort Greene Park - Battles: The new Battles album is finally out and I absolutely love it. I cannot think of another band that has shed members in the same way as Battles; originally a quartet on their first album, then a trio for their second and third and now down to a duo for their fourth album - and somehow still performing material from their first album live. The paring down has seemingly only servers to focus them and the new album sounds fresh but still distinctively Battles, with no sense of anything lost or missing. This song is my standout so far, and the guitar line in particular is so good and interesting to me because I don’t think I’ve ever heard Ian Williams play something so distinctly guitar-y in his whole career. This is a straight up pentatonic riff with bends and everything. Filtered through his usual chopped and looped oddness it feels like he’s almost gone all the back around the guitar continuum and is this close to just doing power chords next album. And I’ll support him!

Diane Young - Vampire Weekend: I've listened to this song a lot in my life and I only looked up the lyrics the other day to find out that the opening line is 'you torched a SAAB like a pile of leaves' which I somehow never noticed. What a power phrase. There's also this very good quote from Ezra about it: "I had this feeling that the world doesn’t want a song called ‘Dying Young’,“ says Koenig, "it just sounded so heavy and self-serious, whereas ‘Diane Young’ sounded like a nice person’s name.”" and he was right to do it. This song is 100 times better because he’s saying Diane Young than it would be if he was saying ‘Dying Young’. That’s a songwriting tip for you.

Monster Mash - Bootsy Collins & Buckethead: Hey did you hear Bootsy Collins and Buckethead did a cover of the monster mash? Thank god for freaks.

The Dark Sentencer - Coheed And Cambria: There's not that many bands that I absolutely loved as a teenager that I've completely abandoned. I've moved on from a lot but I'll still keep up with them if they have a new album or something. Coheed And Cambria are one that I've almost completely turned my back on. They've had 3 apparently pretty patchy albums since I stopped listening after Year Of The Black Rainbow, which was extremely bad and really taught me what people mean when they say an album is 'overproduced'. On a whim I decided to see what they're up to now and listened to their album from last year and guess what: it rocks. It's got everything you'd expect from them: big riffs, bad and confusing lyrics, his weird high voice, overwrought and overlong songwriting, cheesy muscleman solos. Everything about this band is sort of cheesy and embarrassing and takes itself way too seriously, but I'm discovering slowly that that's what's so good about it. The weird pulp sci-fi story and mindset that underpins this whole band is ridiculous and overwrought and as a result it gives the music a reason to exist the way it does. It’s so big and dumb because the story it serves is so big and dumb. It feels exactly like reading Perry Rhodan or some increidibly long and dense but not especially good series like that, it’s pulp music and that’s what I love about it.

Romance In A (6 Hands) - Sergei Rachmaninoff: Piano works for 4 hands (where two guys sit next to each other on the same piano) have always seemed to tend towards the realm of the gimmick or party trick, and works for 6 hands (where three guys do it) even more so - but this Rachmaninoff piece is just beautiful and I can’t believe I haven’t heard of it before this month. It doesn’t overload everyone with a million things to do, it just builds this very wide harmonic bed for the simple melody to swim in - then the way the melody transfers over to the middle register is just magical before the tension of the final section takes over and builds.

Love's Theme - The Love Unlimited Orchestra: I’m so glad I got to learn about the Love Unlimited Orchestra this month. Aside from having one of the best names in music, they were Barry White’s backing band and had their own solo instrumental records too. Here’s a fun aside: Kenny G was a member when he was 17 and still in high school. This is a genre of music that has seemed to totally disappear into the realm of parody and farce only which is sort of a shame because it is unironically very beautiful and dense in its own way.

Dancing In The Moonlight - Liza Minelli: Can you believe I thought Dancing In The Moonlight by Toploader was an original until the other day when my girlfriend played this Liza Minelli version that predates it by several decades? This also isn’t the original! It was written by a band named King Harvest in 1972, with this version AND a version by Young Generation both coming out in 73 and a whole bunch of others in between (including a Baha Men version in 94) before Toploader finally had a proper hit with it in 2000. Truly the world works in mysterious ways. This version is the finest I think, it just goes and goes, frenetically unwinding at a breakneck pace before opening up into a flute solo of all things and then winding up again even and finishing in a kick line breakdown. Absolutely no limits.

Girls - Royal Headache: The sheer amount of power and melody that this song manages to pack into a minute and a half is incredible, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more instantly relatable opening lyric than “Girl! Think they’re to fine for me! Oh girls! And I’m inclined to agree!”

Pov Piti - Matana Roberts: In anticipation of Matana Roberts new volume of her Coin Coin album series that just came out I relistened through the three previous albums and they are even more powerful than I remembered. This song serves as a pretty good mission statement for the whole project, and the heartrending tortured screams that open it set the tone for the rest of it. Matana Roberts sings the injustices of slavery into being, and her sing-song delivery highlights the trauma - her indifferent delivery mirroring the indifference of the world at large. The way she rattles off this story like she’s gone over it a million times and grown numb to the facts only accentuates the pain in the telling, a pain that rises to the surface in the screams of her instrument and herself.  

Kingdoms (G) - Sunn 0))): This new Sun 0))) album is one of my favourites they’ve ever done because it’s so straightforward and back to basics. Every song is just ten minutes of straight up no-nonsense, big, rich, drone. They even put the notes in the track names so you can drone along if you like.

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