Music Review // Tara Van "Things I Wanna Say"

 

One of the best parts of this song is how you can take the lyrics.  There have always been things, throughout time, that people have wanted to say and for whatever reason just did not say them.  Maybe you wanted to tell off your boss.  Maybe you had a great come back to someone who insulted you but you thought of it a little bit too late.  But as I think of what "Things I Wanna Say" is really about, this seems more like having romantic feelings for someone and wanting to tell them that.

As this song begins with this light drum machine type beat, which I feel comes out in a lot of songs by rock bands that do ballads, there is eventually this just glistening of acoustics which follows.  While there is a shift, it's ever so slight, and this whole just feels less like it's put into verse/chorus/verse and more like it's split into two parts.  The rhythm is steady and the way that the vocals can just melt into the music give it this overall pleasant vibe that makes you feel like you're not even listening to music but rather floating around on clouds.

In the way that this is a song in two parts musically that is also reflected in the lyrics.  During the first half of the song, there is a line that says: "If you could read my mind but you don't know".  That first half is about the "Things I Wanna Say", but what takes us into the second half is that, as the song says, "Suddenly it slips out".  This gives us the line which corresponds directly to the first half because now the song says: "Don't need to read my mind cause now you know".  The way those two lines are connected is just not something you see enough of in songwriting these days.

What I also like about this song is that it is a mystery.  The idea of wanting to say something is established and then it is in the lyrics that it does in fact get said, but what that statement is exactly is never mind quite clear.  While watching this music video you could become quite bold in your assessment of it, but I also think it's just about those feelings.  It's about the feeling of loving someone and not knowing how to tell them, but then it just kind of comes out and you can't put the genie back in the bottle.  Either way, this is a nice song that you can make your own through experience.