The opening song of The Last Goodbye feels like coming home after a long time spent away. “This Version of You” feat. Julianna Barwick invites us to return again to the familiar space in our hearts where ODESZA sits beating on their drums.
The Last Goodbye brings back the 2012 ODESZA sound. Summer’s here to stay I guess. Except this is an evolved form, the past brought into the sounds of the future with a gentle hand. The title track “The Last Goodbye” feat Bettye LaVette is a journey of sounds, an exploration of emotion, and a glorious farewell. The rest of the songs begin a lullaby of huge proportions. The latter half of the album relaxes you into the immediate classic “I Can’t Sleep,” so reminiscent of In Return.
The album ends with “Light of Day,” feat Ólafur Arnalds a sigh of relief. Relief at the fact that we do not need to worry about losing the ones we care about. Relief that love is a connecting force. One that can be used, almost like magic. The people, the things, the moments you love never truly leave you. True love makes them yours forever. True love makes them ours.
“We found comfort in the fact that those who we love stay with us, that they become intrinsically part of us, in a way.”
— ODESZA
Now let us get (even more) vulnerable here…
This love letter is one that is years in the making. 10 years of ODESZA passed by in the blip of an eye when you look at it from this perspective. And 5 years ago, just after A Moment Apart was released, I opened my computer in a fevered haze. Before I had considered writing even a hobby, words leaped from my fingertips. I wrote a small piece titled “The ODESZA Paradox.”
I have tossed aside many writing projects in my past. There are very few that I hang on to. I am my own worst critic and yet… This one is one I’ve just never managed to get rid of. To me, it felt like one of the first truly creative things I had ever made in my life. As a fairly uncreative person, the urge to create has always been something I’ve struggled with. At times it feels like I’m ripping apart pieces of myself trying to give them away. But these words felt easy to release into the world. Writing them felt like a necessary part of my personal experience, and years later this piece still holds that wide expansive hope.
In celebration of a 10-year love, I present to you in part “The ODESZA Paradox”:
Imagine this. You are standing at a show the lights flashing bright, the DJ is REALLY GOOD and you haven’t stopped dancing the entire set. Say My Name starts playing and the excitement in the crowd is palpable. Everybody knows this song, and as the lyrics start you can just barely hear everybody singing along above the noise of the beat. The lights turn on the audience, you close your eyes and the light on your face feels warm, the connection to the audience is physically felt by every part of your body. A cool breeze blows through and you smile as the music takes over your body. You’re standing in your local venue. You’re standing in a club. You’re standing in the sand on the beach, in a forest at a festival, at the after party. Anywhere you go, listen hard enough and you’ll hear it. No matter the genre of the DJ, wherever you’re at you are almost guaranteed to hear them playing, everybody probably has their own favorites and you’ll hear a variety of their music mixed in a variety of ways even. But they are everywhere. What kind of thing could cause this phenomenon? Science? Magic? A little bit of both?
In the first song of the A Moment Apart album, it is a spoken word story given by a woman about an astronaut who was sent into space alone. The astronaut hears a knock, on the outside of the ship, and in order to keep from going crazy he falls in love with the sound. It is heavily argued that throughout that album (and potentially the previous album In Return) you can hear the knocking noise, always there, always part of the music. Almost a certain type of hypnotism that you could be involved.
But what is it actually? Is hypnotism really one of the key ingredients to ODESZA’s music? Or is it something larger than a little science that is pulling people toward their music? ODESZA manages, with the use of very limited words, to capture heart. It is almost as if their frequency as a band relaxes a person's guard enough for the heart to open. Often described as light feeling, bright and free, it is almost as if ODESZA has discovered a way to physically open someone up to emotional suggestion through their repeated tonal gestures. In a way the flow of their sound allows those, even those who may not usually be able, to follow their own flow within themselves. Each of their songs has the ability to flow from one to another, gaining momentum and speed and intensity and then coming down again and again. But never stopping. There are those bands sometimes in which you show up and they come out on stage and they simply never stop playing. The songs become blurred and eventually the music is just the flow of the band, no distinction or structure, just the band and their music and the urge to keep dancing. The sound that ODESZA’s music has seems to lift people up, makes them feel light and bright themselves. It brings to mind the idea of life, its ever flowing circles, up and downs, loops and so much more as common rifts and note compositions are frequent throughout all their music. It gives a sense of completion, as you stand there listening you find yourself letting go, letting the music carry you and your body, letting the music take the control.
Often times in this life, we get caught up on a lot of different things. All the things going on around us can make our brain a little fuzzy and can make it really easy to feel as if you’re losing control. Relinquishing control is something that isn’t normally an easy task for almost anyone, but funny enough is often the only way to move forward from most dark places in life. It seems to me that Odesza’s music has that ability to take the control so that it is out of your hands and you are simply floating along without the actual fear of having to let go. As if they are the keeping the key to your cell and the thought of being free isn’t so hard to envision anymore. Maybe this is a little out there, but ODESZA calls for release in all forms. It asks you to let go and because that is something that can be so difficult for people to do in their daily lives when given the opportunity, given a lit pathway upon which to walk, they run. It is naturally going to vary from person to person, DJ to DJ, on why they chose ODESZA, but it is obviously something that has had the capability to capture massive audiences of all kinds, bringing people together and lifting listening souls up.
I sit here years after I wrote that piece, feeling exactly the same. ODESZA seems to inexplicably connect me to my favorite people, to my favorite things. Their music has woven its way so deeply into my life that it is inseparable from my love for music. This love is the reason I am even sitting here saying all of this to you. What an honor it must be, to give love to so many people as ODESZA has managed to do.
To once again find these feelings of bittersweet joy, connectedness, and elation within their music is an honor. To be here together with you all as we do it makes it all that much sweeter. Cheers to 10 years of Odesza. In remembrance of those who did not make it here to see this moment with us, cheers, to love itself.
Listen to The Last Goodbye from ODESZA below
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