I’m sat in the office listening to “Maybe I’m Dreaming” by Owl City. The music takes me away from the drudgery of chasing my own tail, and allows me an escape of sorts within my own head.
I’ve always been a bit of a fan of “electronica”music made with synthesizers. I guess growing up during the explosion of dance, techno, and trance has embedded the sounds of the famous keyboards and synths into my subconscious. Who remembers the Yamaha DX7 of so many late 80s pop tracks, the Korg M1, or the Roland D50.
I’m giving away a childhood spent messing around with music keyboards, aren’t I. When I was about ten years old my parents bought a second hand “organ”. We spent hours flipping the switches, and pressing all manner of buttons that were supposed to make it sound like various musical instruments. In reality it just sounded like a speeded up hoover played backwards through a hosepipe. Over time the organ got replaced first by an entry level Yamaha “multi keyboard”, and eventually the might “Yamaha HX-1”. In it’s time it seemed like sitting at the controls of the Space Shuttle.
Messing around with music keyboards lead almost inevitably to Jean Michel Jarre, Oxygene, Equinoxe, and the rest of his discography. When dance music arrived, I bored my friends with derogatory comments that I’d heard it all before (because I had).
Throughout the 90s and 00s, grunge, indie, and rock bands made something of a return to the charts, and I forgot all about electronic music. Until Owl City.
I’m not entirely sure where I first heard “Fireflies”, or where I bought the “Ocean Eyes” album frombut once I read about Adam Young on wikipedia, I was hooked. Single guy hates his job, suffers from insomnia, writes music to get through each night, and ends up with enormous series of sleeper hits, and a worldwide best selling albumIt’s the kind of story they make movies about.