![]() Like that time my crush decided it would be better if we stayed friends after spending the night kissing on her backyard trampoline inside the gated community. Burdened with the anvil that is low-stakes, serialized teen fiction, the song quickly transforms into a hymn, one where I can repeat the first few lines when life gets first-world, suburban tough. In that moment, and for several subsequent moments, I begin to associate feelings with Heap’s keyboard-controlled, digitally harmonized vibrato. Y’know, the sort of spectacle that pulls at the heartstrings of affluent suburban teens who want to believe their lives are also full of exotic soap opera melodrama.īut it’s that gunshot that lingers - punctuated by Heap’s computer-assisted vocals, her voice the acoustic incarnation of a teen, drowning in emotion. The scene itself is standard daytime stuff: The show’s blond protagonist is about to be killed by his brother until his on-again-off-again girlfriend shows up to the motel where the two brothers are brawling, just in time to shoot her boyfriend’s brother in the back before he can smash her boyfriend’s face with a rotary phone. , handed an essential moment in the teen drama television oeuvre. Millennials everywhere, but especially privileged suburban teens like myself are, thanks to the creators of The O.C. I’m in the depths of the doldrums of adolescence, misanthropy and the sort of unrequited high school love that feels like it could be happily ever after, if only she notices me. Like someone trying to remember a quote they might eventually tattoo on their inner bicep and then later regret, I mouth the lyrics back: “Where are we? What the hell is going on?” ![]() Then Imogen Heap ’s “Hide and Seek” pours into my ears through my headphones: “Where are we? What the hell is going on?” I can’t remember which abyss, I just know it’s deep and I’m staring, peering, forcing myself to feel everything by way of not actually feeling anything. I don’t think I’ll ever hear a song i like more than this.It’s 2005. she said the raw energy and emotion of the moment inspired her to write a song with such passion. I will also include the fact, that Heap used some of the confusion and pain from Bush’s face when alerted that the Twin Towers were struck on 9/11. The lyrics are so beautiful and imply so much more on the bare surface. The use of the vocoder (and much like the song “Woods”, the absence of music) creates a stripped sense with the feelings of confusion. “Trains and sewing machines” implying a wedding dress that is now useless. (The repetitive nature of that last sentence created a tone of annoyance and an inability to write creatively.) This song is about a loss. The use of the vocoder in this song creates a blatant and obvious sense of distortion and confusion. The takeover, the sweeping insensitivity of this still life. Whatever tool Heap chose to pair them with would be no match for the exposed and vulnerable tone of what was written.Ĭrop circles in the carpet, sinking, feeling. Above all others, I have never heard a song more beautifully written which can so flawlessly access raw and painful emotion through just lyricism. I know what some of you might be thinking: “Aaron’s running out of songs with auto-tune in them,” and to that I answer: “No.” I chose this song because it is my favorite song. But if you listen to the song, I don’t think anyone would argue that the sounds are palpably similar. It just doesn’t use the normal auto-tune electronic phase vocoder. I’ll give you guys a disclaimer: THIS SONG DOES NOT ACTUALLY USE AUTO-TUNE. Okay, so I’m cheating a little bit by posting this one.
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