Adventure Time is one of my most favorite shows of all time, and if it were in the scope of this post then I would go on and on about what it means to me.1 However when it comes to praising Adventure Time, the soundtrack in particular tends to stand out. I can’t help but feel overwhelmed with emotion when I listen to songs like Remember You or Time Adventure. However, there was one song that just never really hit me in the same way those other songs did. That song was Everything Stays.
Don’t get me wrong I most definitely had an appreciation for the melody and sound of Everything Stays. There’s something so elegant about how it places you perfectly in the setting of its contents. You feel the whooshing of wind through trellises as you experience walking through the garden the song describes. The lighthearted synths accompanied by rolling strings perfectly sets up the tone of the song. You know that this feeling is bittersweet. However, that is exactly at the core of why I didn’t fully feel this song. I’ve seen things change, but I’ve never left anything behind and come back in the way it happens in the song. I could understand how the song might capture what that feels like, but I couldn’t understand what that feeling was to my core. Without having a true connection to the song it was nothing more to me than a nice tune. However, I can now say I understand the true feeling encapsulated by Everything Stays.
What prompted me to write this was the overwhelming sense of emotion one feels upon heading home from college for the first time. For me especially it was something I had never really experienced before. The longest I’d been away from home up to this point was about 3 weeks after an extended summer vacation. While that is a long time to be gone, it pails in comparison to the seven weeks I’d been away at college. Even if I had been gone on vacation for that amount of time, I still don’t think that coming home after that amount of time would’ve hit like it did coming home from college. When you come home in summer, your friends are still all around and you can fall back into routine as if nothing has changed. When you come home after going to college it’s as though you’ve time traveled. The world you left is like a split timeline, still moving on without you. As you maneuver through college, a new class does the same things you did when you went to high school, now without you. Although you’re likely happy in the new place you’ve found yourself, part of you still yearns for the life you’ve once lived. In going home, you act on that urge and a sense of odd, bittersweet euphoria washes over you. It’s something unlike anything you’ve ever experienced.
It is that feeling that is encapsulated within the heart of Everything Stays. Most everyone out there will one day leave home for an extended amount of time, in the pursuit of creating a new home for themselves. However, the place they once lived stays embedded within their core. When you finally do return you find that the places you lived in remain in place, but they bare new scars you weren’t there to see form. Just as the song goes:
Everything stays right where you left it
Everything stays
But it still changes
It’s a lyric so simple yet so subtly complex. You can listen to it without knowing what it means and feel the intent behind its words, yet you will not understand it until you’ve shared in it’s associated experience. That’s exactly how I felt when I got home. Finding that the places I went are all right were I left them but knowing deep down, despite signs of visible change, they are altered. A new generation has experienced them and given them new meaning. The places where I once played, learned, and cried, have now been passed down. In a way I am both happy to see them live on, but some part of me wishes they could stay just as I left them. Everything Stays hits on the feeling so well that it was the first thing I thought of when my home started to rise above the nearing horizon. If someone were to ask me how it feels to come back home, I could explain it to them in words, but I think pointing them to this song would better describe the feeling. Music is like that, it carries an energy within its tone that goes beyond the meaning of just its lyrics. I’ll always have the songs I like, ones that make it on my playlists, but then there will be a separate spot in my heart for the songs I truly understand more than anything. Everything Stays is one of those songs, and I’ll carry it with me for the rest of my life.
Bookmarking this for when I eventually write about adventure time. ↩