BØRNS

It’s always really exciting when you get into a new musician and then find out after you’ve made the jump that they’re actually pretty local. There is something special about listening to music and knowing that the person who created that piece of art shares some experiences with you. When a friend of mine pushed me to listen to BØRNS, an up-and-coming artist that is going to be hitting Michigan on tour next week, it wasn’t until after I got swept up in his music that I looked into it a little further and found that he is a native of the west side of the state.

Listening to the few songs from his debut EP, I would never have guessed that he was from here. I’m not exactly sure I can pinpoint what Michigan inspired music sounds like (and really, how can you when you have Motown sound mixing in with hip-hop and colliding with some Sufjan Stevens), but his sound is different than anything I would ever expect coming from this state. It moves beyond the steady ebbing sounds of acoustic folk but stops short of the hard-and-fast pace of industry inspired beats, creating for itself a space filled with notes that feel electrified and surreal.

BØRNS utilizes his vocal range to force a feeling of upward motion in his songs, building up to soaring notes that leave the listener feeling like they’re floating. He pairs this overcharged sound with lyrics that take you to places uncharted, weaving motifs of water and electricity through his songs. 10,000 Emerald Pools takes you deep into enchanted waters on a quest for love, the music video featuring graceful and fluid underwater dancing that accentuates the fluidity of the song. Meanwhile Electric Love, as you might have guessed, takes his enchanted sound and lays down lyrics that focus on the power of electricity and its parallels to an all-consuming attraction.

The cohesiveness of the tracks on his debut EP is reinvigorating. While it may seem like a less daunting task to make four songs that mesh well together as opposed to an entire album, their seamless ability to flow into each other makes them feel like one single work instead of four individual pieces. This is impressive from a debut album put out by a man who is just a few years older than the students on this campus. Even more impressive is that this ability to take a musical motif and make it an integral part of the sound of his music appears to be something he developed at a young age. When scanning YouTube for more songs by him, I found a video of a performance he did at TEDxGrandRapids in 2011. I know that TED has made a few appearances on our blog in the last few days, but I’m just going to leave the link to his performance here, because the way he weaves French sounds into his music and storytelling is pretty cool.