By Jeffrey Alexander Martin Tuesday, January 22, 2019 
I have a treat for you today. This is the first time that I'm looking at a song that hasn't been released yet.

Adelaide came together in 2014 when Laura, the lead singer, started the process of recording songs that she had written over the last 10 years. They released "The Bigger Picture" album in 2015, and are coming out with more new music now.

This song is called "Deep Waters". When Bill emailed me this song I looked up Adelaide and couldn't find the song on their Youtube, their Facebook, or their website: https://www.adelaidemusic.com/

The song was good, so I wanted to review it. I messaged Adelaide, and I believe I chatted with Laura. I'm lucky that she was kind enough to send me the lyrics. This song will be released next week. So, this is a sneak preview. Exciting!
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Violent waves crashing all around thundering and deafening sound threatening flashes moving in
the water is rising up again
I need your anchor steady me
keep me grounded

I won’t be swept away
I’m not afraid of what is coming
you’ll find me on my knees
because in Deep Waters you won’t
let me drown.

​I hear you calling us to be
Stirring ripples in this sea
spreading out and going forth
To every corner of the earth
the rain may not stop falling down
but you are my refuge

I won’t be swept away
I’m not afraid of what is coming
you’ll find me on my knees
because in Deep Waters you won’t
let me drown.

I’ll take your hand and walk on water because you are faithful
although the storm is raging on
you are faithful

I won’t be swept away
I’m not afraid of what is coming
you’ll find me on my knees
because in Deep Waters you won’t
let me drown.

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(I'm not sure if Adelaide intended that first line to have line breaks or not, but that's the way she sent it to me so I'm leaving it.)

I've listened to this song a bunch of times now, and I still feel like I'm missing something. But, I am having a strong experience with it. The reaction gets stronger every time I listen to it. That's because this song is all images.

It reminds me of active imagination from the psychologist Carl Jung. In this technique you take an image, often a dream image, and observe it. When you observe the image it will start to move and change. The mind is made to construct narratives and stories. And that's what it does.

Eventually you seek to be able to consciously influence and act within this imagination process. In active imagination the key is physiological reactivity, how much you feel it in your body. The more you feel it the more beneficial the therapy will be.

These images work on two levels. On one level they are personal. Each individual is influenced by their society, their experiences, and their thoughts and feelings. So, to some extent all of these images are personal.

On another level these images are universal. They are images that are embedded in all humans, and that's why we can all connect with them. This is the idea of archetypes.

That first line paints such an intense image that you can picture yourself in that place, at least I can, "Violent waves crashing all around thundering and deafening sound threatening flashes moving in". This is a bad situation, an overwhelming situation. I think the next line is interesting.

"the water is rising up again" means that the water was higher before at some point. And, maybe that's part of why this song works so well when you listen to it over and over again. It has cycles built right into it, as does all of life, and all of existence.

This song has a lot of things that we could dive into, but we are going to be limited in how much we can really do. We can only go so deep. This song is meant to be experienced. I'm willing to bet that this song was written in an intuitive way. It was felt when it was written and can only really be connected with on that level.

Instead of piecing out the part about needing an anchor in life when the waves of chaos are crashing against you, the part where being on your knees evokes the image of praying and how this submissive faith in a higher power relates to Job, the call to ministry, the water version of the butterfly effect, the relation to Peter walking on water, and how being overwhelmed by the potentially infinite complexity of the world is like drowning, I'll explain why the song will always be more powerful than any explanation of the song.

Knowledge occurs at different levels. The first level is the enactive level. This is where we do things. When we are acting there is more information contained within that action than can ever be communicated. But, communication is extremely important.

Communication is primarily how we learn. We learn a lot more than we think. We learn what to do, how to do it, what to say, when to say it, what to desire, what to fear, etc. Most of this learning comes from someone that knows more than us. They present us with a little bit more than we know. So, if we have to communicate to learn all of this, how do we communicate it when we can't communicate it all?

It's hard, that's the answer. One of the best ways is through iconic knowledge. Iconic knowledge is one level up from enactive knowledge. You lose some of the information from the specific situation, but you seek to keep the important things, the essence. That's what this song is. It presents icons, these images that we can connect to and experience.

The next higher level is symbolic knowledge. This level loses some of the information that is contained within the iconic level of knowledge. This is where we give statements and propositions. Let's look at the first four lines to see how much would be lost here.

Here are the first four lines as Adelaide sings them, this is iconic knowledge.

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Violent waves crashing all around thundering and deafening sound threatening flashes moving in
the water is rising up again
I need your anchor steady me
keep me grounded

- - - - - - -
Now, let me translate this into the symbolic level of knowledge and see how you feel about it.

- - - - - - -

When a situation if your life so presents itself in such a way as to appear threatening and overwhelming in the near future and you knowing that this type of thing has occurred to you in the past
It is important that you are able to connect to a higher power to garner strength and help keep you emotionally stable and thus better able to stay aligned with your conscious principles in life

- - - - - - -
Now, I'm sure that some people are just moved to tears over these amazingly emotional lines that I have written. Yeah, I'm joking. It's pretty boring. But, it's presenting the same ideas, just in a way that doesn't move you.

Remember in the beginning how I said that the emotional connection and physiological reactivity are so important? Well, what does music do? It combines these iconic images that move you emotionally with sounds that go right through your mental filters and straight to your heart. It's designed to move you. This means that music has the power to change you at the deepest level.

I think you'll find that when you listen to this song, and then come back and read this again, you'll really be able to see how the song is working on you at different levels, and how powerful those different levels are. In this weird case you'll have to wait until the song comes out next week, but I'm sure Adelaide will let us know on their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/heyadelaide/

(Thanks to the psychologists Carl Jung, Jerome Bruner, and Lev Vygotsky for the insights. Thanks to Adelaide for the lyrics. Thanks to Bill for the song suggestion.)

By Jeffrey Alexander Martin Monday, December 31, 2018
​
Yes, that's the real name of the band, Grandpa Loves Rhinos.


Alright, without further ado, let's dive into the article.

The first thing you probably think when you hear about the band Grandpa Loves Rhinos is, "What's up with that name?" I know that's the first thing I thought. Well, it's a literal statement. The band is two brothers, and their grandpa really did love rhinos. He even had a room full of collectible rhinos.

There are some other interesting things about this band. One, they decided that the title of their first album would be a bit of advice, "Better Eat Your Wheaties". Is that advice or is that a threat? Good question, but I'm not going to go there. Next is what I find most interesting. Here is a blurb from their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/grandpalovesrhinos/

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Grandpa Loves Rhinos hails from the state of Idaho and is comprised of Paul and Seth Hyde, brothers who are geographically separated due to their killer jobs in the US Air Force.  Seth, a fighter pilot, and Paul, a satellite controller, write and record music together over the internet.

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I think it's pretty awesome that they seem to be making good progress as a band that isn't even in the same location. This is becoming common in companies, they're called distributed companies. I teach English online and one of the companies I work for is completely distributed, meaning that there is no office location at all. Maybe more bands will start doing this since the technology is available. But, it might be hard if you don't have the strong personal connection developed as brothers. Time will tell. It seems to be working for Grandpa Loves Rhinos because they signed with Indie Vision Music in 2018 and released this album.

Today we shall take a look at their song "Aquaman". I pulled the lyrics off of https://grandpalovesrhinos.bandcamp.com/. They aren't is the greatest format, but we can work with it.

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you dragged him down into a wishing well, i guess it’s your wish to hide him under the water, it refracts your face and contracts a space, some distance aside from all others, I won’t follow in and I won’t throw money, my 2 cents won’t help you here, plus the water’s lookin' chili and I don’t wanna mess up my hair, could it be that what i need is just a little nudge along? cuz i could use a “3,2,1”, so guess i'll dive in slow with risk of drowning underneath, aquaman, if i find you, you better help me breath, no scuba gear and 2000 years, king the 7 seas and creatures of the deep, you're so misunderstood, they setup a zoo, submariner zombies and ghouls, let's find Atlantis before the robots do, you need to help me breath, when you drank his blood did you, did you become like aquaman, or did you turn into another underwater vampire?

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Now, obviously we're talking about the DC Universe superhero Aquaman. And, the Aquaman movie with Jason Momoa did just come out this year. I saw it, I liked it. But, this isn't referring to the plot of that movie. I'm guessing I would have to look into the comic books to be able to explain some of the lines of this song, but I'm not going to go through all of the lyrics. Instead, we're going to take a bit of a different look at this one.

You can tell that there is a bit of a plot here, but it is a very loose plot. Basically, someone needs help going into the unknown, doesn't get it, slowly goes in anyway, hopes that Aquaman will find and help him, but fears that bad things will happen. This is a pretty straightforward hero journey. But, it doesn't fill in all of the details like in a novel or a movie. One of the reasons it doesn't do that is because a song is short, but you could fill out a story a lot more than this in a song if you wanted to. So, the story being like this is on purpose. Why? Good question.

I think there are two reasons. One, this works well with comic books. In comic books a story is told with pictures and a few words. In between those pictures there's a little bit of space. Your mind fills in that gap to create a story. In the book "Understanding Comics" Scott McCloud calls this filling in process closure. It's an amazing thing that the mind can do. In a movie you don't need to do very much because there are a lot of frames, with a lot of detail, moving very fast. In a comic there are a few frames, with less detail, not moving. It's a different experience. As an aside, I think the pop punk sound that Grandpa Loves Rhinos has goes well with some comic books.

Next, fictional stories can be viewed in two useful ways, either as simulations or dreams. A simulation is usually detailed and orderly. This would be like reading an Aquaman novel. A dream on the other hand can be crazy. They can skip around. They can seem to not make sense, but really your dream is trying to solve a problem in a way you just can't understand yet. This song is more like the dream and less like the simulation. We jump around a bit and get the general idea of a story based on these odd little pieces that just barely fit together. It's fun, I like it. The research in this area is amazing, and if you're interested I suggest you start with "Why Fiction May be Twice as True as Fact" by Keith Oatley.

I could talk about literary theory all day, but hopefully I've already given you something to think about. Listen to the song. Watch the music video. See what you think about it and feel free to let me know.

Jeff Martin
JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com