American singer-songwriter Adam Young, aka Owl City released his seventh studio album “Coco Moon” on March 24, 2023.
It is his first album in five years since the 2018 album “Cinematic”.
The album comprises 11-track, written and produced by Adam Young.
This time, he has created the album in his own quiet refuge from the chaos of the outside world.
“I've been spending a lot of time reading and going for walks in nature, which helps me to stay focused on what's important instead of getting caught up in the craziness of social media,” Adam Young said. “After a hard day or week or even season of life, one of my favorite things is to put on my headphones and zone out on the music I love - it always feels like I'm escaping in a healthy way, and when I come back to reality I feel a little more equipped to deal with what's difficult in life.”
On the album, he provide his audience with a similar sense of solace and clarity.
He said, “Over the years I've had people tell me that my songs have done the same thing for them, and that's really given me a sense of purpose. To me, there's no greater honor than to hear that my music might be a place people can go to feel uplifted, and to contrast the darkness of the world with something more hopeful and positive.”
Adam Young said of the album, “'Coco Moon' is made up of 11 songs because I like the number 11. Some songs on the album are autobiographical, meaning you had to be there. Writing is how I prefer to sort things out, so I turned some of my journal entries into songs. Some songs on 'Coco Moon' are metaphorical in a story kind of way. I like to read books because books take me places. When I pick up a book, I leave planet Earth. I wrote a few songs inspired by this. And then some songs on 'Coco Moon' are odd. Meaning, some have unusual structures, some don't make a lot of sense, a few are extremely wordy, others are a little too long. Creative oddity is beautiful to me so I embraced it.”
He continued, “The point is that 'Coco Moon' is a very Owl City album. It is quirky. It is odd. It is unapologetically myself. I made an album that is exactly the way it was supposed to be, not an album that popular culture… or algorithms, or analytics, or anyone else on planet Earth told me to make. I wrote me. Average, ordinary, weird me. CS Lewis said to Tolkien, 'If they won't write the kinds of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves.' Amen to that. I started by imagining an album I wanted to listen to. The result is 'Coco Moon.'”
Adam Young explained about some tracks for the album.
“Adam, Check Please”
“It's about the first job that I've ever had, I was 16 years old and a friend of mine, worked at a local grocery store in my hometown and he was kind of my in for me for working there. I remember I put in my application, I did the interview and I was hired part time after school, five days a week, working in soon be my department in the store, frozen food.
Whenever there was a wave of customer that came through the store and things got kind of backed up a shift manager would call me over the intercom and that was my cue to drop whatever it was I was doing, run up to the front, uh cash registers and open a new checkout lane to keep the crowd moving through. When they would call me over the intercom, somebody would always say, 'Adam, check please.'
My first day on the job, they gave me the name tag, a little clip-on name tag that said my name at the top Adam Y., under that it said the department I belonged to, 'Frozen.' And under that it said 'Years of Service' with a space. There was a little space in front of it where removeable number would go. The idea was to change the number as the years went up. But somehow my name tag never got the update so I was there for two years and the two years I worked at this grocery store it said, 'Adam, Frozen, one year(s) of service.' And I still have the name tag.
And that's the song. I'm so grateful that I had the opportunity to get my first job at the grocery store that I worked at. I'm really grateful for the money that I earned and values that I learned along the way, particularly how to work hard and how to take pride in doing a good job, didn't matter what I was doing, I learned to take pride in what I was doing and that chapter of my life was really important to me, it was a really important part of my story and I wouldn't trade it for the world.”
“Kelly Time”
“It's about being okay with not always knowing what's gonna happen. It's about finding the strength to keep moving forward, to keep moving on, and it's about learning to stay optimistic about the future even though it's always up in the air. 'Cause if there's one thing that I do know, tomorrow, the sun will rise, and you never know what the tide might bring.
Just like everybody else, I've been through a few different ups and downs of my own, but the thing that I always hope to come away with after going through a difficult experience of any kind, is hopefully a new sense of purpose. Even just some kind of confirmation that I'm on the right path, um, I fully trust that God has a plan and he's gonna take care of me, but sometimes life is just really hard. And I think that simple human nature is to wanna be in control as much as possible; to avoid those hard times. But I really wanna learn to bask in the feeling of that weight being lifted off of me whenever I remind myself that I'm, in fact, not in control, it's actually a huge relief.
I feel like I can always use the reminder that it could be so much worse than it is. And most of the time, the things that I worry about never turn out nearly as bad as I expect them to. So, what I did is write this song sort of as a way of reminding myself that. In the future, whenever I play it on tour, um, what I really hope is that it makes me feel all the more grateful for where I'm at and what I've been given.
I read a quote the other day that kinda spoke to me that said something like 'hard times don't necessarily always build character, but they do often reveal it'. So, that's my hope for the times whenever I'm feeling like it's a hard road that I'm on and I'm just struggling everyday to keep going. Um, I hope that the hard times indeed make me stronger in the end because I know that, deep down, even if I don't always feel like it, I really am ready for anything.”
“The Tornado came”
“The Tornado came from wanting to invent a story rather than write something autobiographical, and it turned into a story of a kid who's delivering papers when a horrible storm starts up and forces him to take cover so he won't get swept away,”
“Vitamin Sea”
“It's about the everyday kind of hustle of normal life just has its crazy way of getting heavy over time and it weighs in my shoulder like it can get crazy and it's just about those moments when I realize that this is going on. I realize I'm running out in fumes and look at myself in the mirror and I just go, 'Whoa, I need a break right now.'
A vacation to me can mean almost anything and it can be almost everywhere. But I think maybe my favourite scenario in this case is one where I'm sitting back and I'm relaxing by the ocean. I've been really fascinated by the ocean for as long as I can remember. I've written a lot of songs about it, so all I need to be happy like I can forget my troubles, I can decompress and I can unwind. I just need some sunglasses and a chair on the beach.
When I was writing this song, I was imagining that a vacation could be something like a daily supplement, something you could take in a capsule, in the morning like a vitamin but something that you could also be a deficient in. It's taking me a lot of years but I've figured out that I really need to check in with myself every so often and figure out on how to de-stress because if I don't, I feel like I'm gonna explode.
I found myself in Hawaii for the first time and I was blown away, back when I was 10 years old, I got a Nintendo 64 game for Christmas called Wave Race 64. It says jet ski racing game and instilled a fascination of the ocean in me especially tropical settings because it was so different than I where I was from. When I made it to Hawaii years later, I remember immediately off the plane feeling like I was in a paradise that I'd only experienced in the video game like it just become real to me. I was 22 years old, I was walking down the sidewalk toward Waikiki Beach in Honolulu. A place I'd never imagined that I would have opportunity to visit. I passed by a Burger King and what did I hear playing out of the overhead speakers? 'Vanilla Twilight' by Owl City and I just felt so grateful and blown away and it was yet another magic moment.
That's 'Vitamin Sea'. I admit that I'm kind of a workaholic so when I get into something, I really get into it and it's tough to pry me away from it. It took me a long time to figure that out and no matter how fulfilling whatever I'm working on is to me. Sometimes I just want to lay that down and go somewhere else, somewhere that I can just exhale for a while. The nice thing is that I can do that really anywhere, but again, maybe my favourite place in the world is on a beach in Hawaii where the only thing there is to worry about is my tan line.”
