— पञ्चसहस्राणि चतुःशतानि नवतिः —
Troye Sivan, my most recent singer discovery—whom I discovered five years ago now, even though he had been making and sharing music on YouTube several years before that, since his very young teen years—released a new album today. Naturally I love it, although my one criticism would be that the tracks are way too short, averaging three minutes each. This means a ten-track album clocks in at barely more than half an hour. I've already created an "expanded" version of the album as a playlist, stretching the tracklist to 14: I replaced the opening track, the wonderful "Rush" the single for which is only like two and a half minutes, with the "Extended" version (still all of three and a half minutes); I tacked three non-album singles from 2022 to the end (two of which were from the soundtrack to a Paramount+ movie in which he starred, which I have not seen); and finally a remix version of "Rush." Both these "Rush" tracks were taken from the single EP. This makes the album work better for me, stretching the runtime to a much more solid 46 minutes.
This is only his third full-length album, although he's made a career of releasing EPs. I cobbled together an "album" playlist of his 7-track EP from 2020,
In a Dream—apparently put together during stay-home orders in Melbourne—with another four non-album singles from around the same time tacked to the end.
Troye Sivan is young enough to have come up in a very different music industry than the one I grew up with, where single songs or short-form EPs are far more easily released here and there. I'm old-school enough about music to prefer full-length albums, and the thing is, even Troye Sivan's best output, by far, is on his full-length albums. His last one,
Bloom, was released
five years ago now, and was how I discovered him: it's still my favorite of his albums, which had been brought to my attention by a follower on Twitter who had also previously introduced me to (also Australian) Sia. I downloaded his previous album, his full-lenth debut,
Blue Neighbourhood from 2015, at the same time. That album is also wonderful.
Kind of amazingly, it has now been eight years since his debut, full-length album. He was 20 years old when
Blue Neighbourhood was released; 23 when he released
Bloom; he's 28 now.
A lot of Troye Sivan's music makes me think of Ivan, mostly because I was listening to both
Blue Neighbourhood and
Bloom a lot around the time I went to visit Ivan during the three months he lived in Vancouver, B.C. in 2018. I actually didn't purchase the albums until shortly after that trip, but for some reason I always associate that music with it.
There's something about Troye Sivan's singing voice that I just love, it has a beautiful warmth to it. Combine that with his overtly queer sensibility, and for me, you've got a winner—it puts him in the same camp as Lil Nas X. They actually have somewhat similar singing voices, although I do think Troye Sivan's vocals show a bit more talent. (Lil Nas X, much like Madonna before him, has far greater showmanship.) I think they would do great in a duet though.
There's been an interesting evolution of Troye Sivan's musical content in his albums:
Blue Neighbourhood was far more romantic in nature;
Bloom shifted into clearly sexual territory but using thinly veiled metaphor;
Something to Give Each Other is a bit more straightforwardly explicit—right down to the iconic album cover shot of him grinning with his head laid back against the crotch of another naked man. And I was thinking about this today, how I don't find Troye Sivan especially hot when just looking at him, but when you combine his vocals, his lyrics, his musical production, and his video performances—that all makes him undeniably sexy. It's an interesting state of being.
I love the music more than anything, though. I think people lose sight of that when thinking of pop idolatry. Madonna's success is clearly largely attributed to her combination of sexuality and showmanship, but none of that would have
ever meant anything had I not loved the music itself. It was the music that made me love her, not her persona (although the persona helped). This is why I just can't get into Taylor Swift. She seems unusually cool as a person in a position like hers, but I just cannot get into her music.
So it goes with Troye Sivan. I love to be enveloped by his cozy singing voice. When he released
a music video that smacked of raw, queer sexuality in a way I had never seen in music videos before, that was just icing on the cake.
— पञ्चसहस्राणि चतुःशतानि नवतिः —
— पञ्चसहस्राणि चतुःशतानि नवतिः —
Should I tell you about my evening last night? There's not a huge amount to tell, as I stayed home while Shobhit worked a 5-9 p.m. shift.
I kind of thought: what the hell, I'll go ahead and watch
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 on Disney+. I don't know why we had to switch to a different cable box the last time we signed a new contract with Xfinity, but even though the last one had a Disney+ app, this one doesn't, which is annoying as shit. I tried watching the movie using screen sharing from my iPad via the Apple TV Box (which itself is ancient; I've had it over a decade, and unlike newer models, it cannot add new apps—therefore it
also does not have Disney+, though I'm sure newer ones do), but it kept disconnecting and then jumping back to the beginning of the movie. So, I took my dinner into the bedroom and watched the movie on my iMac desktop computer.
I made the right decision not bothering to see this one in the theater. I mean, given my AMC Stubbs membership, it would have made no difference in cost, but it would still have been more effort than it was worth. I mean, it's fine. I laughed a few times. But, it's fucking two and a half hours long. It had no business being that long. Whatever, I can check it off my list now.
I continue working backwards logging all the movies I've gone to see, on Letterboxd. I work on this while watching stuff at home, as I did last night. I'm back to November 2015 at the moment. Closing in on a decade! So far I've logged 1,162 films. And I still need to work all the way back to 2002, which was the first year I logged all the films I saw that year.
Anyway, that movie took up the majority of the evening. It was close to 9:00 by the time I finished, and I was getting ready for bed shortly after that, when Shobhit got home. I didn't hear him because I was listening to the Troye Sivan album in my AirPods—the official release date is today, but because it's midnight on the east cost at 9:00 here, albums become available to me at 9 p.m. the night before.
I was in bed pretty early. But then? I wound up engaged in a long exchange in the group chat, because Gabriel had shared
a TikTok video of a woman reacting to something that will stay with me forever: another woman making "mashed potatoes"
out of Lays potato chips, and
preparing it in her kitchen sink. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I texted the group that I don't think I've been so stunned since Trump was elected. This may not even be hyperbole. I was more and more shook the more the video went on.
I didn't get to sleep until around 11:30 because of our discussion about this—which was my own fault, because Gabriel had just messaged it to me in the TikTok app, and I was the one who brought it over to the group discussion. And then, I had a hard time sleeping, even though I didn't even drink any chai last night. I didn't start sleeping soundly until probably 12:30. I have no idea what that was about.
— पञ्चसहस्राणि चतुःशतानि नवतिः —
I just had a virtual lunch with Karen. I nearly forgot about it! And, Noah baked a tray of Beecher's macaroni & cheese, which wasn't done by the time I needed to go into the phone room with my laptop to Zoom with Karen. I was so afraid I wouldn't get any! But, there was just enough left for me when Karen and I finished our call.
She has so much travel coming up, we had to shift around a few of our lunches over the next few months. We do have one scheduled when she'll be in town in December, though, that's also during the week prior to Christmas that I'll be taking off of work. We decided I'd come to meet her that day and we'd go get lunch at the bakery that's close to her. We still don't meet up in person often enough.
Otherwise, we kind of caught up just generally. I got updates on the construction of their second house up in Tulalip, which still hasn't even broken ground. Are they even still going to be alive when it's done? I didn't ask her that.
I need to post this and get back to work now. Actually I really, really need to pee.
— पञ्चसहस्राणि चतुःशतानि नवतिः —
[posted 1:06 pm]
