Home in Distant Worlds

I listen to a lot of new music; or, I listen to a lot of music that is new to me. I treat music discovery like a collecting hobby, and my collection is vast. I can always find something new and fantastic to tickle my senses and sensibilities, so I spend more time listening to new music than I do listening to familiar tunes; but there are some musical series that I always come back to, year after year. These series are something of a musical homebase, familiar and meaningful to me, and I can always return to them.

The albums from my trilogy of hip hop trilogies are among my forever series. The Amory Wars, which is all of Coheed & Cambria's studio discography except The Color Before the Sun, is another.

If I were writing about something that belongs to the characters, like their powers, I'd write "Coheed's and Cambria's," but when I write about something of the band's, it has to be "Coheed and Cambria's."

English is fun, yeah? 😆

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: I've got a thing for concept albums.

But there's another series, not concept albums, that I count among my forever collection. It's undoubtedly the nerdiest of them, and I don't expect most people to feel the way I feel about them, but I fucking love the Distant Worlds series ❤️

I haven't even played all of the mainline Final Fantasy games, but I put hundreds of hours into many of them. The stories told in those games defined my adolescence; the music of Final Fantasy, then, was the score of my childhood. Whatever else was happening in my life, I always found joy and wonder and adventure in the worlds of Final Fantasy. That feeling lives on, for me, through the games' music as performed, con gusto, by the Distant Worlds orchestra.

I can—have, will—listen to my Distant Worlds playlist from start to finish without the interruption of any other music. It's an hours-long project that often requires a couple of days to complete; but so is the Amory Wars, and I have my own Neverender at least once a year. Distant Worlds gets the same love from me.

So if you're ever in a small town in Bumblefuck, Cascadia, and you hear someone humming the chocobo theme song in the grocery store, you'll know I'm around 😉

#Music #DistantWorlds #FinalFantasy #OSTs #Orchestral #Symphonic #Bandcamp