5pm_weds | Entries tagged with sia

Academia
Artist: Sia
Album: Some People Have Real Problems
Year: 2008
♥: Ohhhhhh this one is a favourite.
This week -- I battled my way through deciding between three very very different songs -- and finally realized that sometimes, the first instinct really is the best one. So: Academia (the other two will show up soon)! -- this is the post I wrote last Sunday.

I love spring.

I decided I loved it in grade 6. My mom and I had just got back from shoe-shopping and I'd got my first pair of high heels. I was listening to Ace of Base in my bedroom and the sun/a spring draft were streaming in as I sat on the carpet and stared at the tree outside my window. The leaves were so green, the air was so crisp, the world was so ideal --- so in all my 12-year-old wisdom, I decided that spring was my favourite season. Spring in Rigaud is transcendent. Word chosen carefully: the feeling I get when I wake up in Rigaud, in spring, is one that transcends, decimates, whatever else I might be feeling. It's as if everything good in my life explodes into my heart the second my eyes open. Even if life downtown feels blase, common, awful -- when I go to those trees, I am alive.

BUT. The spring of 2008 was probably the best of my life thus far, because it was the first spring that was so intense, so fucking INTENSELY PERFECT, away from Rigaud. I danced nonstop; I dug my nails into my skin until I bled because I literally did not know what else to do, how else to express what I felt. There's a lot of background I'm leaving out (cause, um, I haven't even mentioned the song yet, hah) but suffice to say:

It set the standard.
I broke up with my then-boyfriend because there was no way he could ever make me feel as amazing as I did on my own.

The playlist accompanying this time is my most loved. It's the perfect example of how a song can bring you back, hard and instantly, to another time, another place, another state of being. Every song on this one is an explosion, and, as you've probably figured out by now, Academia is one of the biggest.

We're seeing Sia at Osheaga (!!!), which was a deciding factor on which of the songs I'd post for this particular time of year, but separate from that: I LOVE THIS SONG.
I love the plinky sounds that start us off and echo through the verses, somehow simultaneously endearing and ominous (going with the I THINK, maybe, minor key of the song?).
I love the chorus, how sweeping and grand and melodic it is, how it stands in such stark contrast to the verses.
I love her voice, how quickly and heartfully she runs through her perfect lyrics.
I love the lyrics, I love the lyrics,
I love how she brings in every discipline to show how impossible it is to define love ---- and, well, ultimately anything (because I really don't think this song is just about relationships -- it's about the ineffable, the inarticulable, the impossible made possible). You cannot put anything into a box the way academia tries to. I love the science, the poetry, the math, the snark ("And if I am a number I'm infinity plus one.") --- I think every line of this song is perfect, seriously.
The mean of our heights is divided by the nights
Which is times'd by the daggers and the root of all our fights,
The pass of your poem is to swathe me in your knowing
And the beauty of the word is that you don't have to show it

I love how alive it feels, how I can't sit still when I listen to it, how I am lifted up above whatever mood I happen to be in (I think because it's not necessarily a happy song; there's more to it than that -- and that means I'm not turned off by any cheese. It's real happiness, not ignorant bliss).

And, of course, most of all: I love that this song encapsulates spring. Walking down a street in Montreal with the sun beaming on my shoulders, trees turning green and buds exploding into leaves (OH HEY THAT SOUNDS LIKE TODAY), and memories of a spring where I figured out more about myself than I ever had. This song is pure freedom: in that perfect spring of 2008, I danced to it full-stop in the street because I was finally, perfectly, happy with dancing alone.