Music for A Better Tomorrow: "Stopwatch Affair" by There For Tomorrow
UPDATE (10/8/2016 7:23 PM): Spotify link added at the end to replace broken link
There’s been a lot of negative energy and sadness going around the world lately. If you’re on the internet, you have definitely seen it. I sure have. Saturday night, it reached such an all time high of hatred and rage and sadness and emotion that I literally felt paralyzed. In moments like that, the only thing I really can do to even feel normal again is turn to music and isolate myself from the world for a while. So, Saturday night when I felt myself physically shaking, I turned to one song in particular by a band very near and dear to my heart: “Stopwatch Affair” by There for Tomorrow.
Time doesn’t exist when I hear this song. I don’t exactly know how the four guys in There for Tomorrow did it, but something about this song’s structure and sound makes the earth slow down for me, despite the song being every bit as rock and roll as the rest of the band’s discography. The guys in There for Tomorrow – Maika Maile, Christian Climer, Jay Enriquez, and Chris Kamrada – are brilliant musicians and they never fail to produce expertly crafted arrangements. From the very beginning of “Stopwatch Affair,” they manipulate the music to really attest to the concept of time. The song begins with a steady ticking rhythm, making the listener hyper aware of the passing of time. Just as you start to get accustomed to it, an eerie series of long guitar notes plead out in a way that’s so contradictory to the steady and strong rhythm in the background that it’s a little disorienting. From there, the song is this constant balance between hard and soft, fast and slow, loud and quiet. As a result, it’s hard to focus on anything else but this realm of sound that There for Tomorrow has orchestrated. At the head of it all is lead singer Maika Maile’s impressive vocal ability and his hauntingly beautiful lyrics. I could go on for days about Maile’s incredible talent as a vocalist, but I’ll focus on this particular song. Here, listeners get a taste of what I think Maile does best. Maile has the power to deliver really forceful notes which he does at times, but he shows considerable restraint in his delivery of the lyrics in the verses and other moments of “Stopwatch Affair.” In those moments, an overwhelming sense of vulnerability comes across which highlights the message behind the words Maile is singing. Even without such perfect vocals, the lyrics hold their own. As the band’s lyricist, Maile has a very poetic style in his writing. As such, the lines of this song are filled to the brim with imagery. One of my favorites is “It’s so hard to be patient / When quicksand is traded for dust from the past” because not only do we get this beautiful metaphor of being buried by your past, but also the mental picture embedded in the line is simply thrilling! I highly recommend just closing your eyes as you listen to the words because the lyrics just play out in the imagination like a movie and everything else around you fades away.
There for Tomorrow is a monumental band in my life. They are the reason I am here typing this very blog post now. They turned my life around when I thought I was done for, so I guess it only makes sense that I would turn to them at a point of such weakness. Regardless, I can’t think of any better way I could have pulled myself out of all the bad going on in the world. Music has always been my savior and to anyone out there feeling just as small and just as afraid as I was, I hope music can help pull you out of it too. It may be corny to end this with a quote from There for Tomorrow, but in the words of Maika Maile, “The changing of times will blow over.”