Music Review // JBNG "Born Alone Die Alone"

 

"Born Alone Die Alone" begins with this pleasant acoustic guitar sound that will draw you in, but as it kicks in to the chorus even you can feel it becoming heavier but still remaining acoustic.  There was a time in the mid to late 1990's when artists tried to be heavy while remaining mostly acoustic, but they didn't quite do it like this.  JBNG also has these distinct vocals, gritty and full of bass like Tom Waits but not exactly, which certainly help to make this feel as if it is heavier than perhaps it is if just the music was here.

The idea of both being born alone and dying alone are theories which I do not feel are ever discussed enough.  They always say that when you die "you can't take it with you" meaning all of your physical possessions, but at the same time, you're not taking other people with you.  It is that sad fact of life that when we die, life will go on without us.  We will be excluded.  Thus, we go out alone.

Through this animated music video you can also see a side of this song you might not get from just the lyrics.  It begins with humans, but robots are slowly blended in until someone has a sign saying "Robots took my job" and then by the end we reach the Robot Civil War.   There are strong Terminator vibes, but just the overall message that as we slowly phase out humans with self-driving cars and those little robots that deliver Dominos pizza, we're also slowly killing humanity.  People have warned of this (in science fiction as well) but it still kind of feels like we're headed that way.  

With beautiful backing vocals by Chelsea Laing in the chorus, the song also brings out lyrics such as: "Becoming a memory as fast as you can / Escape is frail" which makes you think both about how time is like an hourglass and that sand doesn't go back to the top, but also we're kind of helping to speed things up with these non-human elements of life now.  If nothing else, take some time as often as you can to just feel like you're doing nothing- to just get out into nature and really soak it all in, before it's all over.