Some albums have underlying themes that loosely tie the songs together and those that are particularly well crafted may even tell a story from beginning to end. This can often be done rather subtly through unifying or contrasting features in music and lyrics, or through changes in direction as an album progresses. Sometimes interpreting an artist's objective behind their work can amount to nothing more than educated guesswork, using the elements they've given you to construct a narrative that may or may not have been one that the artist subjectively intended to deliver. Sometimes you're left wondering whether the artist really meant to say the things you believe they're saying or whether you're just divining fiction from tea leaves based on your own subjective feelings about their work. But sometimes an album practically begs you to read into it as a unified thematic work. Christopher Owens' (former lead singer of the now-non-existant band, Girls) first solo album,
Lysandre, practically begs you read into it as a unified thematic work. On its hands and knees.
The first, not so subtle, clue of the album's self-awareness comes on the first track, titled "Lysandre's Theme." (Read: this album has a "theme.") It's a 40-second melody played, apparently, by Sir Robin's minstrels from
Monty Python and The Holy Grail. It starts out in a somber minor key but hits a final wistful major note that seems to connote a light at the end of the tunnel. If you don't care for "Lysandre's Theme," chances are you will not care for
Lysandre because it is a song that takes its title very seriously. (Very literally. Very re-occurringly.)
The melody appears, with slight variations, at the end of the next four songs on the album, played on Renaissance Fair fife ("Here We Go"), sloppy overly-enthusiastic saxophone ("New York City"), electrical piano ("A Broken Heart"), and electric guitar ("Here We Go Again"). To be clear, these are not hidden "easter eggs" where the theme is subtly tucked into the folds of the songs' melodies. Before each song ends it, literally, slows to a crawl, while the above respective instruments play "Lysandre's Theme" with the steely reverence of a national anthem. As previously stated: on its hands and knees.
So what exactly are we being hit over the head with here? The context is the former lead singer of a band, that had received some critical acclaim with their first two albums, putting out his first solo album. It appears that he's recently made some pretty big life changes, ie, going out on his own, moving across the country and, apparently, leaving behind someone that he loved in the process. The lyrics on the album are extremely straight-forward regarding these events, often earnest to the point of being cringe-worthy.
We start with "Here We Go," where the journey begins and Owens blatantly states: "airplane, take us away to New York City." We also get a recurring theme of him breaking the fourth wall with the listener ("and if your ears are open, you'll hear honesty from me tonight"), further cementing the biographical nature of the album. On the next song, called (ready?) "New York City," Owens describes his journey to the city and celebrates his arrival there on choruses that are catchy to the point of bordering on "jingle" territory. (We're talking 60's soda advertisements with girls in one-pieces hula-hooping on the beach.) Owens comes back to Earth on "A Broken Heart," indicating there's a lost love that's keeping him from moving on with his life in the city. However, he quickly attempts to bounce back up on "Here We Go Again," which is nothing more than an upbeat self-imposed pep talk to not allow that lost love to "harsh his mellow."
At the end of "Here We Go Again", we then hear the sounds of someone boarding a plane and of that plane proceeding to take off. A departure perhaps? "Riviera Rock" begins with the sound of waves on a beach, seagulls squawking, tropical guitars, a sultry saxophone, mysterious sounding girls chanting "Riviera Rock" and... Lysandre's Theme, again, which Owens proceeds to play over and over on every instrument in the Copacabana for another three minutes. Surprisingly at this point, Owens then plays three songs with no reprisal of the theme at all (including one actually, counter-intuitively called "Lysandre").
On "Love is in the Ear of the Listener," Owens breaks the fourth wall again, questioning whether "everything I say has been said before." On "Lysandre," which one might assume may accurately represent the over-arcing sentiment of the album, Owens states that he'll wait, either for a particular person or love in general, to eventually come back to him. "Everywhere You Knew" then describes, in fairly plain language, the relationship between Owens and the love interset that he's left behind. In short: she's gone, he left her, he came to New York. While none of these songs contain the recurring theme, the last one segues into a song called "Closing Theme," which is virtually indistinguishable from the first track.
The album then ends with a song called "Part of Me (Lysandre's Epilogue)" that also includes no hint of the recurring theme. In it, Owens seems to come to peace with his having left his love behind on the opposite coast, singing that "you were a part of me, but that part of me is gone."
Clearly, Christopher Owens wants us to know there is a "theme" at work here. It's the name of the album, it's in the title of three songs on the album, it begins the album, it finishes the first four songs, it serves as a musical interlude, it ducks out for three songs, reappears one last time, and then it's gone. So what is
Lysandre's theme?
My best guess is in, what I presume, might be intended through the use of the name "Lysandre." Owens might have chosen an unconventional British-Canadian spelling of the name (maybe to make it more Google-able) but the name, Lysander, is probably most commonly known from Shakespeare's play,
A Midsummer Night's Dream. Cliff notes: Lysander loves Hermia, runs away to the forest with her to save her from an arranged marriage, a fairy accidentally casts a spell on him that makes him fall in love with a different girl named Helena, Hermia is sad, spell is eventually reversed, Lysander and Hermia get married, there's a wedding, it's a Shakespeare comedy. So: Lysander is love. Then he's love that goes away. And at the end, he's love that comes back again.
On
Lysandre, Owens also has a love, and it also goes away, and then it stays with him (via "the theme"), and it stays with him and stays with him and stays with him and he can't seem to shake it. It finally does start to fade away and he addresses that love on the title track and "Everywhere You Knew" before it appears for one last chance on "Closing Theme." Unlike Lysander though, Lysandre lets go of that love in the "epilogue" ("that part of me is gone"). Like an alternate ending to Shakespeare's play, Owens has the spell lifted off of him but leaves Hermia at the altar and strikes out on his own. Whether it's a girl, or a band, "Lysandre" is letting go... even if it's of something you love.
