Eternal Sunshine & Saturn Returns

I'm writing about music again!!!!

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I didn’t plan on writing this today. I have many other pieces of writing to finish, (especially Now What Will You Do With Your Luck Part 4!), but something came over me this morning. And when I feel something, I guide myself to follow it.

I love Fridays, because it means new music. Ariana Grande released her seventh studio album Eternal Sunshine today and I was giddy and curious to hear it.

Upon entrance the album opens into a beam.

A broken, reflective ball of light ruminating over the loss of a relationship. Smashing into epiphanies through iridescence.

When the third song, don’t wanna break up again played, I immediately knew it was a disservice to be listening without good headphones. iPhone speakers were a casualty upon my ears. I quickly grabbed a pair and slinked into a groove. I actually had to stop what I was doing to listen to this album all the way through. Dancing in the sunlight of my room.

Her shimmering, buttery vocals layered inside the perfect pop production of savants Max Martin and ILYA, sent me into transcendence. We hear Ariana reaching into herself, clearer and more direct. More tuned into herself as opposed to the world. This is her at her barest, yet most formidable, polished, and honed in. Daring, sleek production lifts her strengths and embalms her as a true, gifted pop star.

The album is a spinning, shimmering piece of light, filled with melancholic memories, emotions, and thoughts — each song splashing into one another. Dreams and reality synthesize. Regret makes its stain. It feels like you’re being absorbed into particles of light. How even in this process a loss must occur.

It’s her most cohesive album, and even after only a few listens, can say it’s her best. Her vision is clear and so is her personhood.

When Saturn Returns Interlude played, tears welled in my eyes.

“It’s time for you to get real about life and sort out who you really are” the voice, which is not Ariana’s says.

It’s been one year since I completed my Saturn Return. That period of time was the hardest, yet led to the most fruitful experiences of my life. It was a time laced with decisions that were so uncomfortable and so painful because they forced me to unwind my life. The very person I had built for the past 29 or so years had to be undone. Demolished.

It was hard in a different way, much different from other challenging eras I’d been through. I could not escape myself. Life was a hard mirror. During your Saturn Return, you must sink to the bottom, to the very essence of yourself and catalog what remains. What is true and unyielding within you.

I’ll write more about my Saturn Return another day, but in essence, that period of time felt like I was in a washing machine. My mind and world a fusion of rotating turmoil. But as all washing cycles go, at the end you come out clean. You are cleared.

When I listen to Eternal Sunshine it reminds me of this process. Inside each song, I hear in her voice, a woman, and an artist, who has clarified herself. We hear her signature Ariana essence, like her layered vocals, translucent through each track, but we also witness her form a new nucleus. One that compounds the themes of her sonic journey to join together to create a fresh new bolt.

Each album of hers we hear her come into her own. And because her personal life is so toggled in the public eye, we know the context. We understand it. We can apply it to ourselves.

I think of myself and how I, too, have changed. How I have come to terms with my own bullshit. Yet, how here, through this cosmic process, this ridding, my essence has remained.

Only now, purer.

Life, I believe, is a process of just getting closer to yourself.

And how light, has to lose itself, in order to appear.

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Happy listening!!!!!!!!! Tell me which songs are your favs — so far, don’t wanna break up again, the boy is mine, and we can’t be friends (wait for you) are on constant repeat ;)