“Sprite” by COIN, Sunday, November 26, 2023 (repost)

 Following up their 2020 album, Dreamland, COIN dropped three EPs in early 2021, leading up to their full album, Rainbow Mixtape, released in April. The band wrote and recorded their follow-up album after their 2020 supporting tour for Dreamland was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Singer Chase Lawerence sold his house at the beginning of the pandemic and moved back to his childhood home in Virginia where he began writing music for the next record. The band recorded many songs, yet the songs didn't seem to have a theme. “We broke it down to its elementary form and felt like colors represented the lyrical and sonic themes,” Lawerence told American Songwriter. Each song corresponded with a color and was released on three EPs. Red-Orange, Blue-Green, and Indigo-Violet make up the three sections of the band's fourth studio album.

SUNRISE IN ORBIT. Rather than telling a story, like in their 2020 song "Cemetery," "Sprite" speaks poetically about Lawerence's feeling of isolation. The song seems to be addressing a romantic relationship, perhaps someone the singer has cast aside in the past. "Sunrise in orbit" seems to be drawing a parallel between being in space and being disconnected from a loved one, or family. As children, many of us dream about growing up to be an astronaut. But what we don't realize as children is that being an astronaut means long periods of time being unreachable to loved ones. Under normal circumstances, a touring band might have thought about the isolation. "Sunrise in Harlem," denotes a different city every night, different time zones, a grueling schedule has made many bands quit. However, many around the world knew isolation because of the pandemic. In 2021, Nick Jonas released an album titled Spaceman which tackles the metaphor of living on another planet, away from the ones you love. I think that the imagery of looking at the world in space, along with the line "your eyes were never blue," gives "Sprite" its color in COIN's spectrum. 

THERE'S NO PUDDING, BUT HERE'S THE PROOF.  The question, though, is why is the song called "Sprite"? The green-labeled soft drink produced by Coca- Cola is the most common usage of the word today. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary lists these as the following definitions: 1a) an elf or fairy b) an elfish person  2a) a disembodied spirit or ghost b) a soul. Other popular uses of the word are a kind of computer graphics, a British motorcycle or car, a classification of butterflies, a fairy in the Artemis Fowl series, a creature in Dungeons and Dragons, a Marvel universe character, a term for lighting, or a special melon cultivated in North Carolina. Maybe the song refers to the second definition, a disembodied spirit. Imagining the ghost floating around the earth, watching the sunrise every ninety minutes adds to the loneliness. In the middle of the pandemic, many of us turned to simple hobbies and things that reminded us of a simpler time. We reassessed our relationships. Chase Lawerence found that family and listening to '70s R&B and George Harrison were exactly what he needed. For me, I revisited music from my teenage years and started to fall in love with modern artists who were incorporating sounds of the early '90s. Under normal circumstances, I would say that nostalgia isn't the best way forward. We love nostalgia because it's a tried and true formula for our entertainment. It's sweet and we don't have to challenge ears, eyes, and minds with new material. Nostalgia might be the only thing keeping us from stagnation and fear. But eventually, we'll see that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And if it's too sweet, we might just get sick of the nostalgic overload. Luckily, the carbonated, bubbly music of "Sprite" keeps the sweetness quite fresh.

Read “Sprite” by COIN on Genius.