There's No Place Like Home

By Tatum Jenkins

A hometown is often a place of resentment – the residence of angst and leftover feelings of bitterness that seem to fuel the very gas that takes you back there. However, after being forced to spend time at home, artists are now beginning to examine their roots with more nuance. Beyond the acidic negativity of the memories of childhood, there lies a more compassionate, understanding view of those years, one that translates easily into great music as many musicians are proving.

As early as May, the influence of home became a rising theme. In The 1975’s Notes on a Conditional Form, the listener is almost bombarded by the amount of references to music from the band’s musical origins. Sometimes, an artist must look back in order to move forward with their work, and this was The 1975’s version of a nostalgia trip. As Matty Healy, the lead singer of the band, said in an interview with the New York Times two years ago, the album is about, “in cars smoking weed, Burial and McDonalds and the M62 and Manchester — just England!” This especially reveals itself in songs such as “Nothing Revealed/Everything Denied.” A song dedicated to unraveling the curated persona Healy has crafted over the years in the spotlight, he admits, “I never fucked in a car, I was lying...You can’t figure out a heart, you were lying,” referencing their two songs “Love It If We Made It” and “Heart Out.” This song then gives him and the band the space to start from scratch, to go back to the music that made them want to start a band in the first place. It’s no longer about crafting a story but about writing about their own narrative to understand everything that has happened to them. With influences ranging from Burial to Radiohead, The 1975 rely on teenagerdom and home as a time and setting for this album, asking themselves about what sounds specifically inspired them to attempt to create their own. “Frail State of Mind” calls to mind garage rock, a genre Healy and fellow bandmate George Daniel enjoyed as teens. Most of this album seems to live in that production-heavy sphere with few exceptions  – and even those songs call to mind a childhood in England in the nineties. “You and Me Together Song” is a direct call to the sound of their first album and Britpop/alternative songs of the nineties. While not their best album, they seem so comfortable in their image as a band for the first time in their career. They’re not attempting to reinvent their aesthetic or answer any philosophical question, this album is just one big, messy attempt to understand where they’re from and indulge in that culture. It’s the kind of comfort a person can find at home, when they’re familiar with their surroundings and there’s no need to pretend to be anything else.

Similarly, Dreamland by Glass Animals, which came out two months later, was a band’s rebirth through the past. After a global pandemic and a band member’s time at a hospital for a biking accident, Dave Bayley, lead singer of Glass Animals, was forced to evaluate what kind of music he wanted to make. Could you – in such an emotionally entrenched period of time – really detached yourself from your art? Bayley answered this question by delving deeply in the past. “Dreamland,” the first track of the album, is very straightforward with its purpose, mentioning, “That first friend you had/that worst thing you said/That perfect moment/That last tear you shed”; whether or not the listener knows it, Bayley has trapped them into a tunnel of memories that don’t end until they get to the last song on the album. Lyrically, it has many other moments like the one in “Dreamland” – contemplative, introspective poetry dipped in sweet nostalgia with complex production to give it a harder shell. Even that clean exterior is broken sometimes with children’s laughter from Bayley’s neighborhood woven between beats in “Tangerine” and the audio clips from home movies, such as track twelve, “((home movie: rockets)).” Bayley crafts Dreamland as the muddled timeline of his life, piecing together memories of home in order to make sense of everything he has lost. The sound is less caught up in the aesthetic and more about exploration – how far into the past can a person go before they aren’t living in reality, until they create their own Dreamland? However, Bayley doesn’t get lost. He finds himself in the home video audio clips – tracks that ground this album in more of a reality – and in the last song, “Helium,” which ends with the first verse of “Dreamland,” but in a different key. This kind of cyclical listening experience implies that, at the end of the day, we all can be traced back to the places and memories that made us.

On the opposite end of the world, there’s Oregon, which is where the listener may find Aminé’s Limbo. From the second track, Aminé introduces us to his hometown Woodlawn through a song of the same name. While it’s a song of celebration, he also uses it to discuss racial disparities through references to his friend Mac, who he made this song for while Mac was in jail. Despite the issues with his hometown, there’s a sense of pride in it – a complete acknowledgement of the harm and benefits of his environment. While he uses that song to boast about his rise to fame, “Kobe” is a more intimate track that brings us to his roots and solidifies his true nature. Comedian and writer Jak Knight takes the stage for that song, explaining his connection to Kobe Bryant and how his death affected him – a recurring theme throughout Limbo. Kobe is tied to Aminé's childhood – a staple example of a role model – as Knight explains, “It weirdly, like, fast-forwarded my maturity. It was weirdly like one of those things where, like he died and I feel like my, like, a lot of my innocence in, like, being a young person died with Kobe...Like, I felt a piece of my childhood go with that n***a.” Aminé didn’t just introduce his listeners to his hometown, but took them back to what defined his childhood – what shaped his view of his environment. While there’s less of an emphasis on physical setting, there’s an emotional landscape that is undeniably tied to where and how he grew up. Not only does he mention Kobe as influential to his upbringing, he dedicates a whole track to his mom, appropriately titled, “Mama.” Limbo is Aminé’s claim on his childhood and emerging adulthood; it’s a way for him to follow his career and his identity in a way that feels like it could only be his, pulling back the cheery yellow layer of his last album to reveal a more complex individual. 

Never has an album felt more of a testament to home and identity than LANY’s mama’s boy. While usually creating strictly pop music, lead singer Paul Klien puts on a country drawl and makes references to cowboys, square-dancing, and “being a Southern gentlemen” – drawing upon the aesthetic of the South to create a more genre-less sound. You could probably sing any of these songs with an exaggerated Southern accent and they might begin to sound like a country song. With this album, LANY challenges the pop mindset with subtle injections of country, taking listeners back to his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The second track, “cowboy in LA,” lives in this sort of identity crisis, with the first line being, “Palm trees square dancing under the moon.” LA and Oklahoma are such different places, yet there’s a thread that the band ties through them and it seems they spend this whole album attempting to define what that is. There’s also a discussion of religion through “you!” and “i still talk to jesus.” Drawing inspiration from traditional Christian pop music, “you!” is a love song without a solid identity, just like references to God often linger in an ambiguous place with “Him”s and “you”s. It has a polished, humbling feel to it, a sort of acknowledgment of Klein’s own lack of understanding of the world. Yet he still revels in the chaotic nature of living, dedicating this love song to no one and everyone. “i still talk to jesus” directly deals with religion while “you!” skirts around it, placing a more modern, more West Coast sense of morals. The entire song is a questioning of the religion he was raised on, contemplating what guarantees entry into heaven. He even debates if heaven exists, with the opening line being, “If there’s a heaven/I hope I get in/But I probably won’t.” While he solidifies himself as a good “Southern boy” throughout mama’s boy, there’s also a hesitancy around that identity that conflicts with his other home, LA. This dissonance between places and their influences becomes surprisingly harmonious under the creative contemplation of LANY as they explore the areas where those two places overlap.

Instead of trying to escape home like many of us may crave right now, these artists settle into this concept, rediscovering themselves and their art through their hometowns.