Time is money. Time waits for no one. Time heals everything. We drop these idioms into casual conversation. We snap watches over our wrists. We set appointments, celebrate birthdays, and count down the seconds until the next rite of passage. Our world is ruled by time—but how can we make sense of this abstract, passing thing, this marker of change, this evidence of living? What does the passage of time mean for the individual, and for the universal? Mia Porter embraces these questions with nimble grace in the first song off her debut EP, a three-and-a-half-minute track titled “daisies.”
I keep my treasures in the basement/I know one day they’ll turn to dirt
Mia Porter, a songwriter based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands self-produced her debut collection “okay.” She’s a widely talented artist, providing the song’s vocals, acoustic guitar, bass, mellotron, and percussion. Porter is joined by Silvan van der Zwaag on electric guitar, Morten Brogaard on flute, and Daan Muilkens on drums. The EP is self-described as a reflection on time, identity, and culture as Porter “questions herself existentially as a 30 year old millennial woman.” The opening track, “daisies” represents at first a divergence from Porter’s usual upbeat, grooving style. The soundscape grows from a simple acoustic guitar strum. It’s a calm, golden sound, like autumn leaves rustling underfoot. Porter weaves her vocals over the guitar, guiding us into a poetic reflection on time.
I find my trophies as a child/Someday will be my biggest worth
Porter demonstrates a crisp, attentive vocal quality in “daisies.” She has the cadence of an artist who knows herself to be not only a songwriter but a poet. You can feel it in the careful way she wraps words around melody, the intentional breaths, and the tension between punctuations. And of course, this lyrical focus is no accident. “Daisies” finds the speaker examining her surroundings—the “cactus in my window”, the “treasures in the basement,” the “trophies as a child”—as forms of evidence that time has passed, or perhaps, that the past really happened in the first place.
And when the big bird raven comes at my window and he wants to take me for a ride/Well I would go with him and ask him to take me to the flowers on the hillside
The self-facing vision of time here fascinates me because it seems to suggest a division of the self. There is the You who is looking, and there is the You who is being looked at. In this sense the speaker has become both the observer and the subject of observation, all whilst struggling to hold on to the present moment. The song picks up in the second half, entering more sonically familiar territory for longtime Porter fans as the sound expands, becomes more playful. The vocal harmonies stretch and deepen at this point. The bass thrums to life. Porter sinks even further into her crisp, dark voice.
“daisies” differentiates itself through a wry attention to detail and an unflinching focus on storytelling. It’s a warm, clever track perfect for your springtime playlist.
