"Destiny," Zero 7

Song: "Destiny"
Album: Simple Things
Artist: Zero 7

This video download is the best live video I can find and came originally from their web site. Here's an excerpt from a letter I wrote to a friend after seeing this video in 2004.

Part of it for me is just the honesty of the song. Alone and lonely, fine with it and yet in love. I guess I've been thinking a lot about loneliness lately... It's partly the human condition: we're all alone in some ways, making our way through the world. But, it's also partly not loving ourselves enough, not being our own best friends due to childhood trauma or whatever. The cure, I know, is intimacy... with ourselves, with each other. Real connections, our relationships. It's also hopeful. Many of their songs are hopeful. I love that. As bad as things may be, there's hope. I share that disposition to the world.

Part of it is watching this band put out something good and pure and honest. It just happens right there on the video. It's people understanding something together and doing what they can. It's two people with a vision, making it happen and shepherding it to creation. They're sending out this real thing and people (I, you, lot's of others) are responding to it. I just really feel that music has been kind of dead--- or rather that I've been dead to music (maybe both). For me, that is just like being really dead. Music is such an important part of my life. It always has been. It's in me, it's in my family and I lament having lost my way. Watching that video made me want to come home to music again-- and that's a journey that I've only recently started. Pop music in recent years, in my view, has been largely about manipulation, commercialism, ego etc. I get nothing from "Destiny" than pure artistic expression of human emotion and human experience. To me, that is what art is. It's about expressing our unique experience in the world, and expressing emotion in a way that moves, changes, heals, evokes.

Their song "This World" is just awesome. To me, it's like a single human voice doing three things at once-- protesting the state of the world, explaining that we've lost our way and expressing hope that we might find it again. I just have to believe that that's possible. They just nailed it so well.

Of course the technology that they've used to produce all this intrigues and interests me too.

Can music change people? This music changed me.