"Ghost" by Yellow Ostrich, Friday, June 18, 2021

 

Yellow Ostrich is another one of the bands I discovered on a NoiseTrade Sampler around the end of college. The band is currently the solo project of singer/songwriter Alex Schaaf. Formed in 2009, they released several albums and EPs before disbanding in 2014. However, in March of this year, Schaaf came back with a Yellow Ostrich album called Soft. Today's song comes from the 2012 EP by the same name Ghost. While being a bit of a sleeper, the minimal instrumentation in the early part of the verse along with the slow drum beat makes the song a little creepy. By the verse we have some more piano, but by the bridge we get a noisy guitar solo. Lyrically, the song talks about a relationship that's expired. He doesn't remember the color of her eyes, but he sticks with her because he's afraid of being alone. 

MY FAVORITE GHOST, MY PRIDE, I STUMBLE 'TIL I'M LOST. Like many very conservative Christians, Seventh-day Adventists traditionally teach their followers to avoid the supernatural outside of the Bible. It wasn't unheard of to hear of Adventists not allowing their kids to watch any Disney movie. In fact there were several movies that we weren't allowed to watch, although thanks to public school, cousins, and friends, I saw a few of the supernatural movies of the early '90s. This stance against the supernatural made Shakespeare a controversial read, even in college. However, about the time I read Hamlet for my literary theory class, I started to think about the symbolism of ghosts in literature. I thought about Coldplay's "42" which says: "Those who are dead are not dead; they're just living in my head." I thought about the beginning of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! when the author talked about the metaphoric ghosts that haunted the South after the Civil War. In Korea, there was a display at the Daegu Art Museum about ghosts. The gallery included several artists' paintings, photographs, videography, or multi-sensory depictions of hauntings. To me, ghosts started to be unprocessed parts of the past, both traumatic and enlightening. They are memories and words of people who have either died or are no longer accessible to us. I thought about how unhealthy repressing ghosts is for our mental health. 

I'VE BEEN USING YOU FOR YEARS EVEN AS YOU DISAPPEAR FROM MY MIND. However, it's not always healthy to hold on to the ghosts. For example, relationships that have expired are best put away in boxes, only opening to remember for insight. Ghosts can also be friends who haven't seen in years. You drifted apart as your lives are now completely different. You're in other time zones pursuing dreams that the other doesn't understand. Land bridges are swallowed by the sea and there's Facebook, but can you really relate the information digitally? Throughout my life, I've taken a page from my parents' playbook, establishing and leaving. When my family moved from New York, they took us out of relative isolation and dropped us into a new social scene with new kids at church. Then there was high school in another town with new kids and a new scene. Then I went to college in another state where I knew no one. Then I came to Korea and moved cities. With every move you have the opportunity to reinvent yourself, becoming a more or less true version of yourself. The awesome thing about being in your thirties, is you start to care less, so you can start to be more authentically you. 

 https://genius.com/Yellow-ostrich-ghost-lyrics