Love can be intoxicating.
The anxiety, excitement, and high we get from love are similar to a drug or alcohol-induced high. It almost feels like your body is out of our control when you interact with your crush; you tend to slur your words, sometimes your hands shake, and your heart often races.
Once we’re in love though, especially when we’re young, anxiety turns to excitement and fear changes to heady happiness.
Andrew Goldring, a singer-songwriter from Salt Lake City, illustrates this intoxication in his song “Chemical Spirit Connection”. Goldring’s song is an organized chaos of fuzzy guitar, whispery vocals, and offbeat drums. This chaotic mess of instrumentals mirrors the muddle mental state of those in the throes of love.
“Chemical Spirit Connection” begins with some typical indie rock textures; palm-muted guitar. It quickly morphs into a hazy concoction of sounds, followed by Goldring’s mellow, soft vocals.
Chemical spirit connection –
ethanol on the brain,
altered state of perception,
One more down – now I can’t escape.
The singer-songwriter calls love a “chemical spirit connection” and compares it to inebriation. You perceive things differently when you’re drunk and don’t always make the best decisions at this time.
In a similar vein, when we’re infatuated with someone, we perceive life differently; things smell sweeter and food tastes better. We also tend to do dumb things for love, because in our “altered state of perception”, buying a human-sized teddy bear seems like the most rational and necessary thing to do.
Stuck like a broken record,
spun out repeating all my lines.
Stuck like a broken record,
skipping out of time.
Most of us know what it’s like to stutter and stumble in front of our crush. You know what you want to say, but when the occasion presents itself, your mouth and brain fail you. You’re left babbling like an idiot, hoping you’ve somehow entered an alternate reality where awkwardness is attractive.
This chorus is the most memorable part of the track. Winding, screechy guitars dance around Goldring’s whispery voice, while the lithe bass and persistent hi-hat notes adds a nice groove to his words.
I felt the chemistry rise
and you fall again.
watching you go out of focus,
eyes will tire.
One of the worst feelings in life is regret, especially when we feel like we have messed up our only opportunity with our crush. With every fumbling sentence we see them drift further and further away from us, until they go “out of focus”.
However, by filtering love’s intoxication through a physiological lens, Goldring suggests that we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves since it is out of our control.
What’s more impressive than his lyrics is the way in which the American musician arranges his instrumentals in a chaotic manner, reflecting his chaotic, anxious mind, without compromising the quality and melodiousness of the song.
Goldring shows real potential and maturity in this well-constructed indie ditty. If “Chemical Spirit Connection” is a sample of things to come from the young musician, then we have a lot to look forward to in the indie rock scene.
