Childhood Takes Flight: A Review of Owl City's Maybe I'm Dreaming, Sixteen Years On
Time together isn't ever quite enough...
Most listeners will relegate Owl City to the purgatory of one or two, possibly three, decent hits sprinkled on an otherwise unimpressive discography. Even those hits come with thieving asterisks - haven’t you heard he ripped off The Postal Service? - and only one (“Fireflies”) has actually made any kind of lasting impression on the constitution of pop music. The trajectory of Adam Young’s career, which has seen him go from ‘copying’ greatness to inventing his own brand of theatrical fodder, has not aided performing any sustainable advocacy of his dwindling gift.
For better or for worse, however, the music of Owl City has wrenched its way into my psyche. There was a period, now cocooned in the haze of early childhood, that I listened to nothing but the first few Owl City albums. After it had just been released, my father claims that I used to say his evangelical song “Galaxies”, off the fortunately dated All Things Bright And Beautiful, was ‘real rock music’, a classification that now defies any learned instinct I can muster.
Nevertheless, not every critical inclination I had in those days veered too far astray from the righteous path. Out of every album Young has made, from the coyly saccharine Ocean Eyes to the unwarrantedly sanctimonious Mobile Orchestra (which is, coincidentally, where I moved past his music), Maybe I’m Dreaming is the only one that has amassed any kind of gravity. It continues to gather flies in my Spotify library, ten years after I first added it to a small roster that included Appetite for Destruction and surprisingly, Tracy Chapman’s self-titled debut. Heavy stuff for a ten-year-old.
Conventional wisdom would dictate that I admit that my continued enjoyment of the album is directly tied to the unsullied innocence of my youth. But Maybe I’m Dreaming is mostly killer, some filler irrespective of the rosy light that time may cast upon it. It opens with the sweeping balladry of “On The Wing”, which remains one of Young’s best as the years have flown by. On this track, and the similarly gorgeous slower tunes “The Technicolor Phase”, “The Saltwater Room” and “Air Traffic”, Young blends the stylistic techniques of ambient music with the cutesy early-2010s electro-pop that he normally dwells in. There are swells and crescendos, gesturing towards a kind of universal beauty that still remains squarely electronic. As Young’s vocals drip with syrupy autotune, resembling a cyborg’s desperate attempt at a serenade, there is a magnificent distance created. This is buoyed by ceaseless lyrical references to the majestically vague (“alpine heights”) and the tangible yet never quite graspable (“where the horizon and the rooftops meet”), with an occasional, deceivingly simple refrain thrown in the mix (“are you there”, “only time”). This distance lends authenticity to the wonderment and dreaminess this album naturally prompts as an artifact of American pastoralism, albeit one operating in reverse (“I was sick of the west when I turned twenty-one/So I moved to the sunshine state”).
America is of particular significance in much of Owl City’s earlier work. Although Of June traversed much more territory, Maybe I’m Dreaming still inherits much from it, even on tracks where America is far removed from the picture. The Europe depicted, for instance, in “Dear Vienna” is one seemingly viewed exclusively through photographs, “black and white” and altogether meaningless save as an object of analysis. Meanwhile, “West Coast Friendship” - despite being excessively corny (you can do better than “aloha, my happy west coast friends”, Adam) - posits California as some illusive oasis that welcomes you the moment you touch down in LA in place of the rightful welcome of being stuck on the tarmac for upwards of an hour. In the context of Young’s faith and small-town youth, these pieces do fit together quite nicely, even if the corners, the extremities of America that Young’s music is not quite adventurous enough to represent, of the assembled puzzle are missing.
Where Maybe I’m Dreaming does fall noticeably behind is in the songs which lack Young’s personal, skywritten signature. Accompanying the almost spiritual “I’ll Meet You There” is a faster, glitchy knockoff of the beat from “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight”, including the bleeps and bloops. This is forgivable because “I’ll Meet You There” is lacking in concept to begin with, but “Super Honeymoon”, which could have easily been a standout track on the album, commits the cardinal sin of having a chorus whose bass part is unbelievably similar to that of “Such Great Heights”. Of course, “Early Birdie” eschews the potential romance imbued in “interstates” and “some place I have never been” in favor of - I kid you not - a synthesizer solo that might have been the most musically impressive thing Owl City has ever done in the worst possible place.
Maybe I’m Dreaming was the first studio album Owl City made, and the second he ever made after Of June. In spite of the artificial, Fruity-Loops-preset instrumentals and a voice that sounds conjured rather than produced, it is still a raw record, with hints of the afflictions that would eventually befall Young’s creative potential. For all its faults, however, it does assume a certain beauty, even if that beauty is often hidden behind cliche and needs to be guided out by a compelling, unscarred hand. This is not an album teenagers can navigate the rest of their lives with.
To give some credit to conventional wisdom, when I first heard Maybe I’m Dreaming, I was holding on to my iPod while my father drove the rest of our family through the rolling tea plantations of Ooty, a town in India. I remember sticking my hand through the window - I was all of eight and this was one of the only times I had experienced reasonably cold weather - as “On The Wing” began. Now, sixteen years later, that remains a decidedly difficult image to detach from my impression of the album. Not much else has come close to transplanting it, even as I have tried to force the neural pathways in my brain and forge more recent connections; it is difficult to release your grip on anything from your childhood. Perhaps this works out for the best. We all get older someday.