Still Believe In Good Days

Songs of Saturn, track 1. Thank you SZA.

If I was offered enough money to pay off all my debts to I stop listening to SZA forever, I don’t know if I could do it. 

It’s April and I have listened to Saturn for the last hour. I believe I am 29. I believe I wouldn’t be where I am right now w/out the albums I’ve turned to for the last couple years. I love listening to an album straight through, it brings me back to youth and magic, where the imagination and the heart tell a story to the body, how we get to feel into true parts of ourselves when we listen to music. It is a tool for worship and communion, a human thing, or really an animal thing. 

I turn thirty in December and cycles are ending for me. Old monuments are being torn down and new ones are being erected in the city of my body. The religion is changing, or it’s returning to what it once was. True belief, true magic, true love, and I’m talking about music still. Music is a way into these things. The power of art - I think about it all the time, write about it all the time, have to stop myself from talking about it all the time. I wrote today, I am a disciple of life, alone and the right hand of life is art. Art awake. Art undead. OK sorry, I’m just feeding into my lore at this point.

In youth, I would get swallowed up by the masterpiece of a good album. I would ride my life on them. And when I was slipping in all sorts of directions, music would give me something I couldn’t give myself - the courage, the words & something to dance along w/ to get all the feelings out. Musicians, to me, are magicians. I still get mesmerized. Albums, like any series of artworks, are about the journey into the work. There is the first song and the reprise and finale. We can collect as much or as little as we want, finding new things to fall into on every listen. We change in listening all the way through. On long drives w/ a compact disc, no skips, we go through portals. It becomes part of the landscape, adding texture and the drip drip of feeling. 

A photo that feels like Good Days & a photo that feels like Saturn / both of me, both by Kelsey Gayle, both film

When I tell you music has saved my life, I don’t exaggerate. Nowadays, there is infinite music. We can only keep so much in our life at once so the time we spend w/ a song, or an album waves into our experience and colors it all. I’m thinking of my long ass monthly playlists on Spotify, the ones w/ a vague theme and full albums thrown in there, all sitting and singing together. I curate and I think of the conversations the art is having. I’ve been doing this for the last couple years, started around the beginning of my Saturn return, inspired by a good good friend. I noticed there were albums that were on most, if not all, of the playlists I was making, and that some slipped in at certain times of the year (like SZA’s CTRL in Spring and Summer and SZA’s SOS in fall and winter and Good Days and Saturn are on every single one). 

After college, when I stopped writing poetry and didn’t dare fuck around w/ fiction, I began writing little essays. Some were deleted before they were finished. Some remain unfinished. Some were submitted and published to a small project called Memoir Mixtapes, a digital lit mag w/ work in dedication to music. It wasn’t surprising to me that the one thing I could let myself write about was music. I’m not a musician, but I wanted to find some way to honor the art that has been w/ me for what seems like a significant time in my life. Life, this tripping, tumbling, dancing thing. 

What I’ve come up w/ is a new series I’m calling Songs of Saturn. A collection of personal essays and art inspired by the music I’ve been listening to. We’re gonna play it fast and loose w/ the term essay and it’s going to be a limited series (relatively) (probably). My running list is albums I’ve had on repeat for some time now and the boundaries of my Saturn return are getting thinner by the day.

Even now, the sun fights for her place in the sky and Saturn is starting over again, again. And when I get in the Soul to meet my friends later, I’ll listen to Good Days and blow a kiss up to God. I love listening to these two back-to-back, like an ep of two. They were both singles before Good Days appeared on SOS and I’m assuming Saturn will be on SZA’s upcoming (?) album. Always, I listen to Good Days AFTER Saturn, not the other way around, despite being released in reverse. 

Both songs are cosmic. Both have whimsy and both have despair. They feel like they were written in the dream space that is the present between past and future, and it is a space of dreaming. Saturn is out of this world and into one w/ an atmosphere that twinkles and echos, one where we float off the ground and sleep in the belly of stars. Where we can admit to both frustration and nonattachment in the same breath, as some kind of relief. Good Days lives in something like Eden and something like your yard on the unexpected perfect summer day, lush & green between your toes, a day that cradles you w/ marijuana smoke and fruit between friends, a day that stretches beyond a single day and carries your heart through when the world starts to die. Nonattachment is bliss, here, in Good Days.

I swear, SZA sprinkles some kind of fake-doughnut-smell subliminal music magic in her songs because they stick inside me after the first listen. I can’t get enough. She’s consistently been on my Spotify Wrapped since I heard CTRL. This was back when I first moved to Portland, 2017 after college. I had heard a few songs from Z in my last, exhaustive breath of tumblr but didn’t explore her back then.

To this day, when I hear SZA’s mom opening Supermodel, I am driving down the stretch of Congress St. before the city starts to look like the city. It is again a sunny day in Spring and I am driving to my job at the hotel, the sun is out a little longer than it was yesterday. 

That is my greatest fear that if, if I lost control, or did not have control, things would just, you know, it would be fatal.

But this essay isn’t about CTRL, that’s for later. Kindly, Spotify told me when both of these singles were released. Good Days is sooo 2020. Saturn is soooooo 2024. SZA is tapped into the world, the voice of a generation, a beautiful, sensitive siren, curiouser and curiouser. When these singles were released, it felt like a message to the collective rather than anything promotional. SZA was right here w/ us, feeling the world change. She’s blowing it all up to the sky! She’s sick of it, sick of it! She spirals on the pole w/ a book in her hand!

During the big Q and beyond of 2020, the culture was fresh from a worldwide loss of innocence. At that point in time, in December 2020, it felt like it had all been going on for so long. In February of 2024, when Saturn is released, we look back on that winter as still only the beginning. Life has only sped up, gotten harder to believe, harder to life in, harder to reckon w/.  

These songs feel born out of ether, how our emotions can take us there. How life is a ride and reality is a choice, or choice after choice after choice. The world has gone all heady and we can’t stay in the dirt much longer, in the dirt on the ground - would rather be on Saturn, would rather be on my empty mind shit. These are songs after the promise has been broken. How in 2020, we all held our hope high above our heads so it wouldn’t get wet in the floods and by 2024, we want to be off this planet entirely, all our hope on something else, untouched and far away. Or maybe Saturn is waiting on Good Days to make good on its deal, to bring the light back to the Earth and save us all. 

a messy one

SZA finds a childishness in the heavy, heavy weight of the world, something that feels like the perfect balance between holding tight and letting go - at least, it’s proven to me that something so close can exist. Of course it exists in song, of course, of course. How songs themselves are the kiss between truth and fantasy, skin on skin, tongue to teeth and down your spine. In Good Days, SZA finds belief and in Saturn, SZA finds something worth saving. In essence, they are the same, even if the hope passed between the two feels smaller, lighter, and more desperate in Saturn. Both songs, passing the sun back and forth from day to night, from past to future, from fear to love to love to love. 

Like many many of SZA’s songs, there is a prominent theme of maintaining the self through difficulty. SZA owns her shit, her shadows and her sensitivities, her limits as they get pushed and her heart as it gets kicked. SZA is an existentialist girlie. The end of the world is coming and we have to get right w/ ourselves, this world is dying and we have to create a new one. There is agency and there is an urgency.  It’s heavy, heavy, but somehow SZA succeeds in making it all feel a little lighter, groovy, baby, baby. She paints Nirvana as a club w/ a line around the block, a fee at the door, and an empty room w/ a shitty ska band or a comedian no one laughs at or patrons w/ predatory eyes and hands or - a false promise. Nirvana like a country where your tax money funds weapons for a genocide. Nirvana as in, it was beautiful, once, wasn't it?Why does it feel like this? Why does it all feel like this? What happened to our future?

Both songs, innocence lost (I almost named this series that instead, as so much of my life is reflecting that lately and my favorite songs always have some element of that to feel into. This beautiful, devastating, universal feeling. But I’m trying to only be pretentious when it’s poetically sound and not just, all the time accidentally. Anyway). I believe we lose our innocence gradually rather than all at once, all of us at different points in our lives, all of us the easy way or the hard way. That universality makes the best art and the most successful music.

The artwork for the singles of Good Days and Saturn are so reflective of an innocent, youthful state of mind. On the Good Days single, we see sweet baby SZA with adoring eyes and face tattoos, Good Days in script across her forehead. A cheeky Lil Wayne reference and the most obvious symbol of innocence. In youth, when believing in good days was easy and the grass was tall, tall, up to our bellies.

A couple poems written while listening to Good Days, circa 2020

On the single of Saturn are little sketches: an apple and the word rotten, a watch and the words time wasted, a purple fish and the word rare. Little sketches that make an abecedarian poem from the word Saturn with the planet first and foremost in yellow. I remember abecedarian poems from grade school and all the baby books that taught the alphabet. A for atom and N for nothing, . The artwork was created by the artist @sageaflocka who also created the cover for the single Love Galore before it was released w/ CTRL. In that way, it is a call back to SZA’s youth directly. She feeds into her own living code with the cover of Saturn, communicating in symbols, shielding her heart, and playing a game.

A poem from HEY OK NOW written w/ Saturn on the brain

In the rain, I find Saturn. In the sun, Good Days. Listening to them both is a mirror into how we find balance, how we find connection in each other and the earth under our feet. Just now, a flock of crows flew from the yard up into the trees, spooked by something and taking flight as a unit. I’ve added Good Days and Saturn to their own playlist to listen to, one and then the other. I have spent the last week reckoning w/ my life and crying like a child and loving from the deepest part of me as much as I can manage. It’s 4/20 and later, I’ll be throwing all this up to the sky. I wear knit jumpsuit and cowboy boots, feeling a little sad for the world, feeling a little indulgent too. Like my innocence is far far away but has also never been closer.

I wake up w/ these songs in my head and sing to myself in the mornings, like they are just so used to sitting on my tongue. The sun pushes through the clouds on a Saturday and my yard looks like childhood again. My world all broken promises and hope in my ears, in my heart, in the sky.

I’m not even gonna start talking about the music video because it’s a masterpiece.

---

Thank you for taking a chance on this piece, I hope you’ll check out the series as it develops. I’m excited to be exploring something I love like this again.

I would love to hear memories, takes and celebrations of these songs, either in the comments or in a direct message.

XXX,

G