Time to Time

The sound of the season is Phoenix. I remember hearing them for the first time in Lost in Translation, then in Marie Antoinette, serenading France’s queen in a palace of pastels and florals.

Phoenix's cameo in Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006)

And now this summer, their latest album, Ti Amo, has been playing on repeat since June. My favorite track off the album is “Role Model,” which contains the lyrics:

Don't you feel like a witness in distress from time to time to time to time?
Is that just the way the roses fade? Do you want to find out?
Don't you feel like a witness in distress from time to time to time to time?
Is that just the way the roses fade? Do you want to find out?
So sudden, you hear the quiet, summer breeze outside?
I can't tell you what it's going to be, I'd lie

In my design, the rose petals fall on the edge of the paper, acknowledging its presence and consequently mixing naturalism and artifice. Also, the roses are more “real” because they are fading, but what are the roses growing out of? Spatially, where are they? I wanted to play with a sense of reality combined with an abstract, unnatural quality. 

With its sweet, yet sad tone, “Role Model” reminds me of a song that someone hears and causes them to remember a certain time in their life: a particular season, a road trip, or an afternoon. Those times are gone, past, and we can’t go back to them - each a mix of elements like time and weather that can never exactly be repeated. There is a future, too, but we don’t know what it is; there is no way to know, so we just have to be patient. “Role Model” is a pretty expression of the melancholic magic of life.