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It’s Time: Thoughts on a new year
By
Published: Jan 02, 2014
Category:
Beyond Classification
A long post. The words are really just an introduction to a video. It’s fine if you want to skip my words and go right to the second video — the blurry, out of focus video near the bottom. But do not, for the sake of your soul, miss that video.
A fresh start?
Yes, please.
The holiday movies were mostly gloomsville. I couldn’t begin to care about the fate of selfish, self-defeating Llewyn Davis. The other movie-of-the-year, “American Hustle,” was an Oscar campaign with a topping of side boob. My wife and I bailed on “August: Osage County” after ten minutes.
Print also brought no joy. I’d been busily Finishing Something, so I didn’t get to dive into the publishers’ catalogues until last week. Imprint after imprint, I turned the pages, pencil in hand, eager to note the names of books I wanted to read and review. And, imprint after imprint, my notepad remained virgin. Not that these were bad books. It’s just that they were books you’d expect to see. In-depth accounts of recent events. Memoirs that excavated family secrets. Novels that reminded me of other novels.
A film and a song saved me.
The film is “The Past.” The story: An Iranian man returns to Paris to finalize his divorce. His wife, who has two daughters from a previous marriage, is now living with a man who has a son. Her lover’s wife is in a coma; if she dies, they can marry.
A domestic drama. And with such small people. The woman works in a pharmacy. Her lover owns a dry cleaning shop. They live in an un-chic area of Paris by the train tracks. This does not exactly sound riveting. But the writer-director is Asghar Farhady, best known for “The Separation,” which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2012. He’s a master, and adult family drama is his specialty. In the New York art house where we saw “The Past,” there was total silence for the last twenty minutes.
The song is “It’s Time,” by Imagine Dragons. If you saw “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” you heard it a year ago. You certainly heard it on FM radio. It was, reported Rolling Stone, “the biggest rock hit of the year.” The band’s first full CD, “Night Visions,” sold 6 million copies, the biggest debut for a new rock band in six years. “It’s Time” was the most streamed song of 2013 on Spotify. [To buy the CD from Amazon and get a free MP3 download, click here. For the MP3 download, click here. To buy the download of “It’s Time,” click here.]
Here’s an acoustic version:
A foot-stomper, yes? And a statement of major affirmation. The singer is “packing my bags and giving the academy a rain check.” He knows what’s ahead isn’t pretty: ‘The path to heaven runs through miles of clouded hell.” But he won’t look back. Which brings us to the chorus:
It’s time to begin, isn’t it?
I get a little bit bigger, but then,
I’ll admit, I’m just the same as I was
Now don’t you understand
That I’m never changing who I am.
I went to the message boards to read why this song is so important to the band’s fans. I was blown away by the personal identification. Like this:
My father thinks that if I move out and move on with my life, it’s going to change who I am but deep down inside, I’ll always be same person. I just need to turn the page and start a new chapter of my life. I absolutely love this song, it tells the listeners a lesson that no matter where life takes you, you don’t have to change…
And this:
It’s about growing up and following your heart. Having to walk your own path and letting the people you love follow theirs without holding them back or letting them hold you back. Forgetting about school if it doesn’t make sense. Forgetting about a crappy job. In the process of reaching for them we make the hero’s journey, going out into the world, telling ourselves we haven’t changed despite enormous growth. As time goes on though the relationships begin to break down slowly, each person has grown beyond the place they started.
Several put themselves in the head of Dan Reynolds, the band’s lead singer and the song’s writer. Reynolds, seventh of nine children, was raised as a Mormon in Nevada. At 19, he began a two-year Mormon mission in Nebraska. When he returned to Brigham Young University, he decided to drop out and start a band. “A lot of emotions probably go with that,” a commenter wrote. “And some of those emotions are in this song. People might even call your decision-making ability into question. And you might wonder if they’re right.”
Playing a song over and over — that’s not me. But I was so pumped by the power of “It’s Time” I wanted to know everything about “Imagine Dragons.” And that’s how I met Tyler Robinson.
Tyler lived in Salt Lake City. He was a Mormon. He was looking forward to undertaking his mission. At 16, he was diagnosed with Rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare cancer that ravaged his bone marrow. He was Stage 4, but he began treatment. At 17, after a year and a half of chemo, he was declared cancer free.
He loved Imagine Dragons. He met the band. He bonded with them, and they bonded with him.
And then he sang “It’s Time” with Dan Reynolds at a concert in a small club.
It’s a homemade video. Blurry. Shaky. Really awful. If it weren’t the best video I saw last year — if it weren’t the best video I’ve seen in a lot of years — I’d never ask you to watch it. But I do insist. (If time is pressing for you, start at 2:45.)
What you’ll see: Dan Reynolds calls Tyler on stage. They sing “It’s Time” together, arms locked, heads touching. And Tyler, bald but cancer free, shouts out the chorus.
The cancer returned. Tyler Robinson died at 18. The band and his family started a foundation.
You can see this video and cry for the loss. That’s valid. I see something else. Triumph. Fulfilment. Completion. Tyler Robinson loved a song that affirmed him, and he got to express everything he believed with the people who created it. He was one lucky kid.
What’s my point?
Start with Dan Reynolds, talking about the origin of the song:
I wrote it during a very hard time in my life. I had dropped out of college, and I was just sitting down at my computer, and I came up with this rhythm. And the words just wrote themselves. I knew I had something special coming.
When a song is most honest and most raw, that’s when you know you’re doing something right. A lot of my favorite artists are able to be in touch with their problems and put it through melodies. It happens all the time with bands.
What this says to me: If you want to make a connection, you have to get real, you have to be real. Everything follows from that. Is it risky to be that exposed, that sincere? Not at all. Because all the safety is at the edge.
The decent, smart, dedicated people who contracted and edited the books that failed to excite me may think they’re at the edge. But they’re in big offices, with layers of management; in the end, they’re more gatekeepers than advocates. And in an indie culture that knows how to connect with audiences — 55 million views on YouTube for “It’s Time”— they’re in danger of being left in the dust.
It happens all the time in bands. And elsewhere: in the notebooks and laptops of people who make something out of nothing. And, maybe, on web sites. So that’s my goal for the year: to ignore the official culture, if necessary, and find the people who make me cry and hope and believe. And then beat the drums for them. And get a little bit bigger. And never/always changing who I am.
