Daily Jam - Un Nouveau Soleil

Music is powerful. It soundtracks my life. I assume it often soundtracks yours as well. From every day background noise to gentle, sensory tacks for our fondest or darkest memories, the songs we listen to can paint pictures in our heads, a nostalgic scrapbook in the inner recesses of our brains. But every so often, I hear a song that creates just as vivid an image or sequence of events in my mind that also happens to be completely fabricated. These aren’t false memories or anything, but more like daydreams, some sad or happy, or like visual themes come to life via melody. I tend to get a picture in my head that then informs the way I hear the music, adding all kinds of layers to the artist’s original intentions or design that are really meaningful only to me.

And in a way it becomes my own.

Music sure is wonderful that way.

French Synth pop artist M83 has always made dramatic, cinematic music, even long before Anthony Gonzalez scored an actual film, as on 2013’s You and The Night. But it’s that film’s and soundtrack’s closing number, the beautiful and soaring “Un Nouveau Soleil,” that cements itself into my psyche with the inner visuals I’ve attributed to it. I see a gathering of old friends. I see a grand church or cathedral. I see a hazy light and somber faces as they lay one of their own to rest. I also see reconnections. I see reflections. I see tears and smiles and loving embraces. And then ascension.

If you are familiar with You and The Night at all, then you realize that my mental association is far, far off from what the film actually depicts. But these moving images come into play every time I listen to the song, and while it might make it difficult to hear it in any other context outside of the one I’ve created for it, it certainly makes the song deeply personal to me.

As it should be.