By: Bridget Sinden
Vincent Lima is a storyteller, his work transcends you into other worlds all while holding a mirror up to your own. His first album “To love a thing that fades” was released on September 19th and it captures the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Vincent uses cinematic soundscapes combined with traditional folk lyricism to translate the tale into what he describes as an “easy to speak language” of love and grief that allows you to paint yourself into their story.
In Vincent’s words the use of the narrative in the album is “This intermediary place between me writing the song and feeling all the things that im feeling and then the listener over here feeling what they’re feeling…I can speak my own experiences through the vocabulary of orpheus and eurydice and those people can speak their experiences through the vocabulary of orpheus and eurydice and we’re speaking the exact same language.”
Vincent told us that the world he built with this myth stems from his childhood, growing up having read Greek myths with his father. We asked him about what drew him and his writing into the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice specifically, and why he felt it was an important story to tell:
“The reason those stories stayed through the last 5000 years is because they are universal truths about the world told through the lens of human characters and human like gods, so when I was dealing with a lot of the big adult feelings, like grief and loss and those things…I had written the chorus of Orpheus and it was not Orpheus yet, there was no mention of Orpheus, it was just about sort of like feeling a memory calling back to you and turning around and seeing something that is sort of there and not there at the same time… And eventually when I was in that little space I realized that was the myth of Orpheus, that image of someone turning around and seeing something [and] I just sort of let it into the song.”
The sixth track in the story called “Dance Here Slowly,” is an intimate song about not wanting to let go and holding onto something beautiful amidst chaos. It features the line “I’ve called many things love, and so many things grief/but they’ve all just been versions of uncertainty.”
This album Vincent says, is where both of these feelings take shape, “Orpheus is the beginning of the album and that was the one important thing that I decided. Orpheus is grief, is the description of the place and the feeling of losing something and I wanted to build a love story that happened after that. So the whole thing is sort of tentatively accepting that some very deep love can still exist after you’ve lost something, and then realizing that even if that love is to fade…it doesn’t make the love any less real and it doesn’t make the feelings any less worthy of chasing after, so that line kind of like describes the interplay between those two things. Love is this giant amalgamus thing that we say often but we don’t really understand entirely…that’s sort of how grief is as well, we say a lot about grief and in the history of humanity we’ve still not figured out how to grieve… and there’s so many different ways to lose something, and there’s so many different ways to love something. Those can be feelings that alienate you from wanting to feel either of those two things, and this whole album is about the acceptance of feeling both of those things and not turning away from the very difficult things that are hard to define.”
The end of the story and the final song on the album “Charon retires” is a big full circle moment and the track that Vincent says he’s most proud of, in both its musical content, significance to the story and the meaning it holds to the formation of this work. “I wrote that song and was kind of moved by where the story could go, but I knew that it hadn’t happened yet, so it was like I wrote an ending of a book and that was the moment I knew I needed to really flush the rest of the album out and so that’s where all the sort of eurydice fading songs started to come out.”
Vincent says he also views this song as a more mature reprisal of an earlier song of his from 2021 called “the man by the coast” that features a similar character to Charon, saying “There’s this very wise character who lives by the ocean and a young version of me has an encounter with that character and kind of learns a little bit about life. To have that character and that story happen in a much more mature form was really cool for me to sort of be like ‘oh look I’ve grown as a person and an artist and I’ve learned more about life in the last three years’.”
Being able to put together this full length narrative Vincent calls “Creatively Gratifying”. When asked about world building aspects in regards to his creative process with future projects he said “Orpheus kind of happened because it was a return to grief for me, understanding that things don’t always go as I thought they might when I was a little bit younger. I was very exhausted from having to pick songs out of the air and I was always one song ahead of myself, and was like oh okay I’ve got this song, and what am I feeling what am I saying, and I got very tired of that. It just didn’t give me a sense of grounding in life, and this was my answer I think subconsciously to that was to allow myself to create a little environment…and I don’t know if I’ll always do that but I’m doing it again for sure on the next thing.”
To love a thing that fades is a compilation of artistry and a reminder of the compelling power of musical storytelling. Vincent Lima has crafted a space that everyone can see something of themself in and he says he hopes to continue to tell those stories (and so do we).
Stay wild, Stay listening, stay evolving
