“To Be Alone with You” by Fleurie, Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Much of my blog is about nostalgia for different times in my life. Unless you are a futurist, most art is about the past. The ‘80s movies that I grew up watching were about events that happened in the ‘60s and the movies from the ‘90s were about the ‘70s. But suddenly I wake up one day and ‘00s nostalgia is a thing, in music or in the television. So when Hulu adapted John Green’s 2005 debut novel Looking for Alaska into an eight-part mini series, the writers and producers decided to keep the series set in the time of its publication, the early ‘00s. To build a believable setting to the young adult series, the producers created a soundtrack full of songs and covers of songs from the era. The soundtrack as released on streaming services was only a fraction of the music features in the series. Tracks by The Strokes, Phantom Planet, Modest Mouse, and Coldplay could be heard in the show, while covers of well-known hits of that time also appeared on the soundtrack. The original songs that appear in the series are mostly upbeat, while the covers are mostly solemn. Some of the covers are upbeat songs adapted to piano ballads, while others were sad songs reinterpreted in a new way. That’s the case for Fleurie’s “To Be Alone with You.”

YOU GAVE YOUR GHOST. Looking for Alaska takes place at a summer camp in Alabama. The protagonist Miles, or “Pudge,” as he’s called, develops a crush on a typical John Green pixie dream girl, Alaska, who is compensating for a painful past by being a hipster and loving famous last words and the last lines of novels. The novel is broken into two parts “Before” and “After.” The novel doesn’t have a specific pop cultural references marking its setting, but the addition of an early ‘00s soundtrack helps to fuel a nostalgia for millennials and creates an emotional connection to turn of the millennium culture for younger generations. The solemn covers: Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” covered by Miya Folick, Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" covered by Young Summer, The Bravery’s “An Honest Mistake” covered by Mating Ritual and Lizzy Land, and today’s song Sufjan Steven’s "To Be Alone with You" add an emotional weight to the story, a beautiful nostalgia, but also a deep dread and regret about the past.

YOU GAVE YOUR BODY TO THE LONELY. Like Sufjan Stevens, Lauren Strahm was born in Michigan and dabbled in Christian music for time before she started releasing music under the moniker Fleurie. Her music is a balance between electro pop and slow piano ballads and has contributed to several soundtracks. Besides 2019's Looking for Alaska, Fleurie's songs have appeared in Marvel's Cloak and Dagger, Bones, Pretty Little Liars, Grey's Anatomy, and Station 19. "To Be Alone with You" is a well-done cover of a well-done original. Fleurie's take on Sufjan's 2004 song from Seven Swans recontextualizes the song. It's still subtly religious, but no longer homoerotic. It's romantic and melancholy. In the context of the drama, it's a siren song for a doomed character. Perhaps the inclusion covers is how the story is remembered, slight edits in the space-time continuum or a memory trick for the most intimate of scenes. It also establishes Alaska as an ahead of the curve hipster, enjoying a Sufjan Steven's song on her iPod the very year he released his massive breakthrough hit record Illinois. Whatever the interpretation of the song, I'm glad that the cover exists if nothing more than to leave art open for interpretation. And given the way that Green wrote Looking for Alaska, it seem that the author is a fan of ambiguity, too.

Read the lyrics on Genius.