Making Blue Days Yellow
Courtesy of Frank Fieber
The human mind is incredibly complex and a mind so powerful results in equally complex emotions. Growing up, the only thing I felt could reflect and help me understand these feelings was music. It’s the reason why my deepest memories are attached to music, and why I can’t listen to music without recalling certain memories. The only artist that has been immune to this curse is Yellow Days.
Hailing from Surrey, England, Yellow Days is George van den Broek, the husky voiced, cough-syrup yearning lead vocalist. I found his music in a troublesome period of my life. In the same year that I applied to university (good old 2017), with thoughts of the future resting uneasily in my head, I sat at my desk in my cold little box room, right in the middle of a street in the suburbs of West London. I’ve always been a visual person, so I sat on YouTube flicking through the music videos of my favourite songs. Slotted into the recommended videos of whatever indie/alternative sound I was into back then, I found George singing solitarily in a room painted yellow. I was encaptured.
I arrived at university while falling out of an almost 2-year relationship with my high school sweetheart. I was beginning to place myself in the real world, outside of the areas I was used to all my life. I was suddenly walking the streets of Brighton, with its reputation of being unique, freeing, and nothing like you’ve ever experienced before— especially when you’ve lived your whole life in a simulation where creativity is scarce. Where I live, everyone's the same. Any expression of a personality different to others around you is a self-proclamation of being outcast. With headphones in, I resonated with the words I was hearing: “All this time I was just running around”, “I wasn’t looking but, oh, I found/ A gap in the clouds/ The sun comes out, stay up all night, make you feel alright… alriiiiight…”. It sounds awfully cringeworthy, but I really did feel like the main character.
I couldn’t help but fall head over heels, with the help of my newfound freedom, when a measly, indie boy from Tinder— who defined my concept of new, different, and fucking hot— told me he loved Yellow Days. His favourite song? “Gap in the Clouds.” See the lyrics above. We had ‘planned’ to see Yellow Days when he was coming to Brighton a few months later. As the Harmless Melodies record was spinning around in front of my boozy eyes, the words sang my new-found attraction. I thought of him when it played, and I thought of how lucky a coincidence this was. I recorded the needle hitting the plastic and singing this beautiful sound and sent it to him on Snapchat. The form of communication should have made me realise how flimsy this crush was, especially having received a half-arsed response back. But it didn’t matter, then. This was my fantasy. Months later I attended the show, front-row, with a friend who had never listened to him but who I knew liked gigs. I put up the story of Yellow Days singing. He took a screenshot, and replied saying he was entirely jealous. I promptly blocked him.
I would soon find myself in a twisted relationship. It was entirely my fault; I didn’t want to be in it but I felt like I had to be, because it seemed too perfect for me to let go of. At 5am, I told him I was listening to something. We had stayed up all night debating whether or not to see each other again. The sun was beginning to peek in through the blinds. My head hurting, and my delusion was setting in. I sent him the song I was coincidentally listening to at the time. I don’t know why I thought it was a good idea; I could have given it more thought. I do know that I unfortunately gave the impression that I was more invested in this relationship than I was. I sent him “Your Hand Holding Mine”, another hauntingly romantic song by Yellow Days. He said it made him cry. My head hurt even more. “I think I found something in you… All this time I thought it would be your hand holding mine.” He felt like I was telling him this subliminally. I was an idiot.
This relationship, and the one prior, came to be very damaging to my mental state. Carrying me through it all was a song of George’s, which was actually released a year before these events. I was convinced this would be this song I get tattooed on me. “The Way Things Change” became my ‘strength’ song. The key refrain revealed Yellow Days’ move to a more funky/jazzy sound. ‘Keep going, you keep going, you have to, keep going, you keep going.’ I would— and still do— listen to this song on repeat, over and over again. In any of my anxious states, this song pulls me through.
We grow up seeing relationships portrayed on television and in movies with perfect soundtracks to help play it all out on the screen. We spend so long witnessing these moments that we start to play out our lives as if they have their own soundtracks. Combing your hair to sultry guitar tunes; bathing to the sounds of a serene piano; we force an artificial attachment to music in our lives.
Now, I walk from my bed to the bathroom, sleep still sitting on the edge of my being, listening to a hazy soundtrack of some sort and placing my life in the middle of a scene. I don’t know if it means I want to be watched, or I want to feel watched. But it definitely stems from wanting to be that main character— wanting to feel like you are living that life that we watch in the movies; it’s somewhat comforting, having something outside of you, completely unattached. The present becomes something so obvious and easier for you to understand. The song is the real partner in this relationship, the most important one: between us and ourselves.