Spring Special

With her song “family and friends”, French singer, producer and DJ Oklou offers a tender, bittersweet reflection on the importance of human connection.

While it’s widely understood that healthy relationships are vital for our emotional and mental well-being, their link to physical health might be less apparent. However, research shows that people with strong social ties not only enjoy stronger immune systems but also live longer. Social connections have even been associated with a lower risk of chronic illnesses, including heart disease.

So, as you listen to today’s song, which is a trance- and ambient-influenced hyperpop gem, why not share it with a friend or family member? We’ve made the post featuring today’s song publicly available on our website so you can easily pass it along to someone special.

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If an object’s density is less than or equal to that of a liquid, it will float on the liquid’s surface; otherwise, it will sink. This is the principle of buoyancy, where an object displaces a volume of liquid equal to its weight. A buoy, designed specifically to float on water, serves as a perfect example.

People can float too—in saltwater, for instance, or metaphorically. During deep relaxation, you might feel as though you’re “floating” as well as during moments of emotional detachment or stress. Such feelings can stem from a broken heart, as beautifully captured in Julee Cruise’s dream pop gem “I Float Alone,” which is today’s song.

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Dig Deeper

Julee Cruise’s “I Float Alone” was written and produced by director David Lynch and composer Angelo Badalamenti. Lynch featured the song in Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted, a concert performance he directed that starred Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Michael J. Anderson and Cruise herself. The avant-garde play was staged twice in 1989 as part of the New Music America Festival in New York. Footage from these performances was later compiled for a home video release in 1990, which is available on YouTube.

Danish composer and viola player Astrid Sonne’s first two albums were purely instrumental: “I’m so awful at writing [lyrics], I would do anything to avoid it,” she said in an interview back in 2019. Fortunately, she’s changed her mind: Sonne’s third album Great Doubt is filled with careful singer-songwriter-style lyrics while losing none of her experimental, classical-meets-electronic sound.

The track “Staying Here”, for example, features no percussion, but winds itself around a melody played on a church organ. Combined with the lyrics, “Lost my ring, here’s my palm,” the image is crystal clear: Someone is getting married.

Sonne has chosen a particular and evocative storytelling element: Wedding rings were already a thing in Ancient Egypt as well as in Greek and Roman antiquity. They have remained the symbol of loving devotion ever since.

Throughout the centuries, the rings varied in style: In 17th-century Europe, they often included an engraved “Poesy”; the Puritans, ever, uh, puritan, gifted their brides a thimble instead of a ring (although they were allowed to cut off the bottom of the thimble and wear that as a wedding band. My, my, Jeremiah!).

Some elements of the tradition are, however, a lot more recent: Men only started to wear wedding rings in the last century, and the diamond ring reached its fairytale-standard-status only as recently as 1948 when the jeweler house De Beers launched the slogan, “A Diamond is Forever.” As with all the other ring styles, the diamond will probably not really be forever—but the symbol of the ring itself, it seems, just might be.

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