Music Review // dondréa "Northern Roots"

 

With winding guitar notes and banjo-like acoustics, Dondréa slowly and deliberately takes us through a song about growing older and changing.   While this song could very easily be about the choices we make in our life and having regrets, it's not about the regrets.  This is a song of reflection and wonder, which is something I feel like people don't do enough in songs or other art forms.  

One of the most important lines within this song says: "In my dreams I live out my fantasies / Then I wake up to reality / It's not to say I'm ungrateful in any way / Curiosity's got a hold of me".  I think we all, at some point, wonder what our life might have been like had we done one thing instead of another.  But wondering that, thinking about it, doesn't always mean that you aren't happy with how you're living now- you just have that curiosity.  

This song is also, in a lot of ways, about not being able to change who you are.  As the chorus says: "I'll find my way back to you / And my Northern Roots".  Now, just based upon that idea alone we could imagine that if we had Southern Roots, for example, our life might have been much different, but that's not something you can control so you it's not that you want to change it but rather you just have that wonderment and I think that's fine.

As someone who grew up on the northern east coast of the United States, many people here dreamed of the west coast and specifically California.  Yes, my life would have been vastly different had I been born and raised in California.  I like my life here, but it's not bad to wonder if I grew up on the west coast if I might have been a surfer or something along those lines.  I think that having those ideas also keeps our imagination alive and as we grow older we need more and more of that.