A Perfect Reminder

Sometime in 2013, my mom sat me down on the ottoman in front of her bed, looked at me with guilt and sadness, and announced that her and my dad would be filing for a divorce. I could only stare back. I wasn’t devastated, at least not immediately. These things always work out, I thought. Soon, I figured, my dad would return home from Colorado and the nuclear state of my family would be restored. Nothing was to worry.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said. I didn’t.

It was right around this time that I started to wake up on my own for school. I had recently turned eleven, which was a big benchmark for me for whatever reason. I knew most of my friends had an alarm on their phone, so I figured I should get one too. One evening, I announced to my mom proudly that she wouldn’t need to wake me up the next morning; I had it handled. I even had the song picked out: “Shadows” by Childish Gambino.

In my mind, I saw the selection of Shadows as my wake-up song as an important event. Music was, and had always been, a significant part of my life. I listened to it constantly, and loved to analyze it, musing on the details of the song’s structure and meaning until I had milked out everything I could. Hung in my room, next to posters displaying my love for The Shins, Morrissey, and Gorillaz, was a physical list of my favorite songs ever. I could have chosen one of those as my alarm, but instead I chose a song I had recently discovered, a smooth, relaxed track that seemed to be about waking up. “Shadows” fit perfectly. Childish Gambino would be proud, I told myself, to find that I selected his song. It was an honor after all.

For months, Donald Glover’s crooning over harmonizing guitar strings was integral to my morning ritual. Though the song stayed the same, my life changed greatly over the next year. I rarely saw my dad. The reality of my parents’ divorce set in on my life like a slow stormcloud. Stubbornly, I ignored the ever-present cloud, praying for clear skies. Over time, though, I was forced to accept that my family life would never be normal again.

Around a year after I had started using Shadows as my wake up track, I told my friend Miles about how I had used the same song as my alarm for months. Intrigued, he told me he hadn’t ever heard the song. I stared back blankly.

“What?” He announced, “It not, like, popular or anything.”

“No, it’s not that.” I replied and shook my head.

I pulled up the song on my phone. When Miles said he hadn’t heard the song, I realized I hadn’t truly heard it either, at least not outside of the early morning, for the last year. I opened up my music and clicked on the bright, pink and orange cover.

Hearing the beginning of the song was very odd; I began to experience the song version of Déjà Vu. The feeling reminded me of waking up from a vivid dream, the type you want to tell someone about. However, upon trying to recall the details, I would find myself completely speechless, any specifics about what I experienced in the dream totally alluding me. Shadows was both extremely familiar and strangely distant. I had never considered the lyrics or the chord structures. I hadn’t yet found out the time signature in my mind. My normal ritual of listening for unique production or songwriting choices simply had never happened.

The song continued as Gambino harmonized with guitar so smooth and sappy it almost sounded like piano keys. It seemed to be about a love-hate relationship between the singer and a woman. It held a regretful and honest tone. Around halfway through, the song slowed down greatly. The singer exclaimed with anguish, “We ain’t speakin’ no more.” I hit pause.

“Pretty good,” Miles nodded his head in satisfaction.

“Oh God,” I replied, pushing on my temples. “I hate it.”

My friend chuckled. “What the hell do you mean you hate it?”

“I hate it.” Miles laughed again but I only stared back.

That night I removed the song as my alarm, despite the pride I took in having the same song for almost a year. I was frustrated with myself. The title of my wake up song was supposed to be a great honor, not something I could simply hand out to a cheesy, fruity song about some painfully typical, dramatic modern relationship. I cringed at the thought of waking up to it every morning for a year.

2015 was the next time I heard “Shadows.” It came up on shuffle while I was doing homework. For the last year, I had adamantly avoided the track, pressing skip every time. But this time, I was caught up in my math homework. Gambino’s first line, “Face down in the brown grass,” played through my headphones and all the memories of that year overcame me. I remembered my struggles with my dad, now mostly resolved. I recalled hearing the tune every morning when I woke up to get ready to go to a school I hated. Now I was attending a school I loved with a passion. I never truly knew the song, but yet was so familiar with it. “Shadows” was almost like a stranger I had met once, falling in love but never seeing them again. Since the song was my alarm, my life had completely changed for the better. The track held bitter memories, of course, but was also a perfect reminder of how far I had come.