Owl City!

Hi, invisible readers!

As I already announced last week, today I'm going to talk about Owl City. I said that it's my favorite group, although it’s a bit strange to say “group” when Owl City is just one person: Adam Young. But I couldn’t say either that my favorite singer or musician is Owl City because it isn’t Adam Young’s alias or anything like that. Owl City is his project, an electronic musical project (I haven’t made it up, check it out in Wikipedia if you want) that he formed in 2007. So, if we want to talk about Owl City, we have to talk about Adam Young because he’s Owl City’s heart and soul.

Adam Randal Young, who is a singer-songwriter and a multi-instrumentalist musician, was born in a small town called Owatonna, Minnesota (USA) on the 5^th July of 1986. As a child, he always had a “push” to be creative, although there were no musicians in his immediate family. Adam grew up being a very shy kid, like surrounded by a “sheltered bubble”. I find that really interesting, personally, because I feel like that too. Even before coming upon Owl City, I sometimes thought that I had like a hedge around me, something that at times was heartwarming, protective, and at other times was distressing, even suffocating. It’s something that keeps me far away from other people, far away from the good things of relationships, but also from the bad ones. So I can indeed understand what means being wrapped by that “bubble”. You can’t reach anyone, but you can’t be hurt by them either.

Adam began creating his dreamy and sweet music in his parent’s basement at night, as he suffered from insomnia ­­­­˗that’s why I said that Owl City fans usually like the night, because it’s our origin, isn't it?; Owl City’s world emerged from a series of non-sleeping nights.

Around 2006, Adam Young made music under the project name “Sky Sailing”, but he started to post his fizzy electropop songs to MySpace and iTunes under the name “Owl City”, selling about 2000 tracks a week. He released two albums on his own: “Of June” in 2007, and “Maybe I’m Dreaming” in 2008. A year later, Adam signed a deal with a record company and released his successful album “Ocean Eyes”, whose hit single “Fireflies” sold 650.000 copies. Adam began touring through America, China and Japan; and released his expected album “All Thing Bright and Beautiful” in June 2011. A year later, he brought out his latest album: “The Midsummer Station”.

As an Owl City fan, I have to expose my opinion about this album. Before it was released, Adam Young had already notified that it “marked a flying leap in his direction”, as he was working with other producers and song-writers. So we expected a change, we didn’t know if it was going to be positive or negative. After the album had been released, Owl City fans rose with alarmed claiming: the style had changed quite a lot; it wasn’t so much “Owl City”. In fact, there’s a beat in nearly all the songs to make them more “radio-friendly”, so they’re not the sweet lullabies we loved to listen to. In my opinion, it’s still Owl City, and Adam is just exploring new possibilities of creation. It’s fine because most songs preserve their originality. But it’s also true that nobody writes songs like him. Just by listening to the lyrics I could distinguish which are Adam’s ones, because those ones are the most special and imaginative. So, for me, his collaborators are just hindering his work. It’s a shame for those producers and song-writers to spoil Adam’s art, the soundtrack of his dreams and our dreams, just to make it more “commercial”.

I hope Owl City will remain as it used to be: a place in our minds where we can shelter from reality. ^-^


Oh, yes! I nearly forgot it: here I leave you a video where Adam Young explains the name "Owl City". I loved the explanation, so I want to share it with you.:)

See you next week! (Well, not literally.)