Who could've thought I'd get you?
I have been listening to Canadian musician Daniel Caesar's Freudian a lot. It is a record of stunning feeling, and I am overwhelmed by its beauty. Here is an interview he gave Amani Bin Shikhan on Vice.
The first time I listened to it all the way through I was largely open mouthed in wonder. The second time was more of the same. The third time, I was on the 4 train home, and I found my eyes welling up without my permission. It was "We Find Love" that did it.
In front of me on the train was a family of four: pale man and brown woman, with two little ones with complexions somewhere between the two. The littler one was a friendly, squirmy thing, throwing out smiles and gurgles at anyone who looked even slightly in her direction. The older girl was quieter, happily watching the world from her tight little corner next to her dad. At one point the mum kissed the hand of the baby, and the baby slapped her in the face for her kindness. A few minutes later, the man held the face of the woman; his thumb looked soft on her cheek while his palm pulled her closer to his face. Their kiss happened both fast and almost in slow motion; I was somehow not expecting it when it happened, even as I saw it while it was still en route. The kiss made me stare, unthinkingly, before I caught myself and looked away, face hot. It looked like the kind of kiss that had made them parents twice over already. The woman had the sort of wide, beautiful face that Garcelle Beauvais has. It softened with pleasure when she was kissing her partner but in a different way than when she had been kissing her baby's fist.
Freudian makes me want to call every man I have ever kissed. It makes me want to call up even the boys I kissed a lifetime ago. It makes me want to tell everyone I've ever harboured a crush on about it in minute detail: every little smile I allowed myself when I felt their eyes on me; every time I let a hand—or a look—linger, every time I thought of them in that barely lucid state before sleep claims us. It made me want to call up my current crush, and confess the planes of filth I let myself travel on when I think of his face, or his hands.
I found myself thinking, weirdly, of Tevin Campbell as I listened to Freudian. If that sounds like a sort of insult wrapped in faint praise, I do not mean it to. Both Caesar and Campbell have similarly complex and churchy voices; Tevin really was acutely gifted. And while Daniel's lyrics are denser, more adult and more polished than the average pop prince's, both evoke in me the same feeling of limitless possibility. I might fall in love. I might choose someone. Someone might choose me. Ooh, who could've thought I'd get you, Daniel sings on "Get You" and I soar—above my body, above my apartment—before floating away, into something that feels infinite.