You Are An Island and So Am I, the latest album from Cyrus R.O., spent a lot of time digging into the artist’s catalogue of previously unreleased music. Where included songs that were written years apart, the amount of time spanned on the release gave us a glimpse into his evolution as a musician, and in some cases, lays bare old wounds that give us a better sense of Cyrus’s personal history.
“Defect,” in particular, was inspired by a personal epiphany during a dark moment in high school, when the death of one of Cyrus’s peers brought his own mortality into sharp focus.
Cyrus explains that, although it wasn’t the first time someone he knew had died, it was the first time that someone in his own age group had shuffled off this mortal coil. Not only does that have a tendency to leave a much harder impact than seeing off someone who had the opportunity to put the extra years under the belt, for Cyrus it came with a far more tangible realization that he wasn’t so immortal himself.
“To that point, death was a pretty unfamiliar concept to me, and so it was a pretty pivotal philosophical experience in my own life. I tried to capture some of that in the song,” explains Cyrus.
“I think when you’re a kid, adulthood (let alone old age) can feel so far removed from your own life that it may as well be an eternity away. It’s easy to get the implicit idea that you’ll be here forever. Of course, that impression is false and a young me wouldn’t have argued otherwise, but there’s a difference between simply knowing something and truly feeling and understanding it. The first time that I reached that deeper level of understanding, that I truly felt mortal, was when all this happened.”
Cyrus attempts to express this further throughout the video; with flashing lights and, of all things, an expression of thermodynamic processes: the mixing of paint into water and the melting and eventual boiling of ice – only, they’re happening backwards.
“It’s a bit cliche to analogize the inevitable march of entropy with death, but I think it’s cliche because it’s accurate,” says Cyrus. “Just as death is an inevitable result of the passage of time, so too is the mixing of the dye, or the evaporation and subsequent dispersion of water from the pot. We can easily reverse the video, depicting a reality where the laws of thermodynamics function differently, but the result, charming as it may be, is not representative of reality.”
Despite the grim nature of the song, Cyrus chooses to see it as more a glass-half-full situation. He even thinks of his realist’s approach to something so tragically inevitable as optimism, especially considering the circumstances.
“Once you accept the inevitability of death, it makes life that much more precious. It’s freeing, in an odd sort of way,” says Cyrus.
“The same principle also can apply to contexts broader in scope than our individual lives as well. I’m talking about the fact that there still exists a sizeable population in denial of climate change, or who even still denies the role that genocide and racism played and still plays in the structure of this country, for example.
“Obviously, issues like this are so much more complex than something like the second law of thermodynamics, or even the concept of death. But, I think there’s a unifying principle in that we, as a species, are so much better off and can put so much more beauty into the world when we accept that which is right in front of us and make the best of it, rather than live in denial of it. Hopefully not too many more people need to die for us to get that message.”
Whether we’re awaiting the inevitable hereafter or the eventual collapse of society due to anthropological neglect, it seems we’re all just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, according to Cyrus. We may as well make them musical chairs.