The Tapestry of Memories We All Weave

The Midnight’s music on ‘Endless Summer’ feels like a resurgence of Romanticism in our modern era. When I consider what the German poets and novelists of around two and a half centuries ago were doing in their time, I see echoes of it in the works of Tyler Lyle and Tim McEwen.

This song is a fitting one to begin with, as we’ve just made our transition out of the last decade and into the 2020s. This New Year’s was unlike any I’ve experienced before, as it was the first New Decade of my life during which I really stopped to ponder the collective ten years that preceded it. My 2010s encapsulated most of my 20s, my Peace Corps saga, time spent traveling elsewhere, discovering more of what the U.S. had to offer in the great Southwest region, living in Southern California, and much more.

The 2010s was also the decade that I lost my mother. And this song, for me, is centered around the experience of forging a bond with someone during a time of discovery in your life, and how if, that person manages to unlock something inside of you, like a good teacher, a good friend, or a good parent, that ‘something’ never again closes, and that person lives on with you forever. As I read on the side of tree next to a Therevada Buddhist temple in Chiang Rai, ’The Giver is Always Beloved’. And it’s true, for the greatest honor one could receive, is to be remembered fondly for the blessings and gifts they gave to others.

This album is about much more than a niche music genre reviving themes from the 1980s; it’s about bringing youthful idealism back. It’s about giving air to the simple matters of the heart, that touch and move all of us in the stillest depths at the core of our being.

I have no reason to doubt that there will be more of this — returning to simple heart-matters — in our politics and in our arts, deep into the 2020s. We can only get so detached from one another through our screens, and our discourse can only be limited to so few characters. The Language Of The Soul will continue to flood back into this vast network of the human circuitry of love that his world of ours truly is and was always meant to be.