Have you ever come across an album in which you instantly feel that it was made for no one else in the world other than yourself alone? An album that you’ve been endlessly dreaming of without even realizing it, only for it to serendipitously emerge when you need it most as if summoned from the deepest corners of your subconscious. I never thought such a thing could even exist, yet by some stroke of sheer luck that I still don’t feel I wholeheartedly deserve, it found me instead; that it being Vines’ I’ll be here. Buckle yourselves up for a not-so-brief story that is essential to setting the stage for why this album is the one that I will carry with to my grave.
I’ve been endlessly searching for anything to replicate the angelic ambiance heard specifically in “Towards Dawn” off of Rolo Tomassi’s Time Will Die and Love Will Bury It ever since it dropped in early 2018. While that specific song is the complete polar opposite of almost everything else heard on that emotionally chaotic masterpiece of a record being purely ambient with pulsating choral flourishes, it moved me in such a way that I would long for more every waking day onwards. Ever since I discovered that song and album, I’ve been tirelessly searching for something that instills the same overwhelming wave of absolute inner serenity.
My musical expedition for such a song had led me far and wide across the ambient genre as a whole, leading me to discover many albums and artists that while not fitting the bill, I still thoroughly enjoy, albeit for different reasons. Julianna Barwick’s Healing Is a Miracle was the closest I’ve been able to get with her gorgeous choral-driven ambient sound, yet it still wasn’t quite exactly what I needed. Then late one night as I am in the middle of an ambient deep-dive on YouTube, I get a sidebar recommendation for a track titled “being loved isn’t the same as being understood” (by Vines) and that track title alone intrigued me to click on it and so I did; little did I know that my search would finally come to an end.
“being loved…” is exactly (I cannot emphasize this enough) what I was looking for all along and my fateful introduction to Vines. The instant in which the angelic vocals first swell in, I immediately knew and I started to bawl my eyes out while the track eventually faded out. I put it on repeat, shut my eyes and cried until I had no more tears left to give over the next two hours. This song, as does Rolo Tomassi’s “Towards Dawn”, makes me feel an immense sense of cumulative sorrow yet simultaneous tranquility that I still can’t quite explain nor fully understand. I don’t necessarily need to understand it, all that I know is that it is liberating and that is what matters. Any time when the going gets tough, this song was there for me.
Over the next few months as I approached the final stretch of graduate school, life does its thing where it bombards you with seemingly everything at once. Losing a child-to-be and having to put down one of two elderly childhood pets all in the same day was an emotional gauntlet to say the least. Not long after, our other elderly pet passed away completely unexpectedly due to heartbreak, at least that is what I tell myself as those two dogs were inseparable from one another as much as they were from me (or rather I from them). The spontaneous nature of this second passing makes it hit even harder as we never got the closure that we were fortunate enough to get with the first. All that on top of parenthood and dealing with frantically wrapping up my thesis work, I didn’t have time to grieve the way that I would have liked to. As the saying goes, when it rains, it pours.
Thankfully, I had Vines’ “being loved…” to be my anchor in these tough times. Yeah yeah, I know it sounds utterly cliché, but it couldn’t be any more true and real. I could’ve easily crumbled under all the weight, guilt, regret etc…, yet I somehow kept it together and managed to pull through despite the hemorrhaging emotional wounds. This track was the perfect medium to facilitate the transient spurts of mourning so that I could maintain composure and carry on with the Sisyphean task of daily existence. Most importantly, it allowed me to be stable enough to be emotionally present and supportive (the absolute bare minimum) for my wife as she too was suffering deeply, far harder than I was.
Time heals (almost) everything, and we endured with new psychological scars in places where we didn’t know we could get them. Later on early one day, my phone would buzz and I’d see the brief notification line from Bandcamp saying ‘Vines just announced a new album‘, the reason we are here today. I immediately set our PR hound on the loose (my endless thanks to you Toni) to get an advance copy because I needed I’ll be here deep in my bones, especially with how “being loved…” carried me through hell and back. I only include this convoluted preface to contextualize the sheer emotion that this album eventually would stir within me. It was everything I ever wanted to follow up that standalone single from an emotional standpoint, in addition to encapsulating everything that I have been wanting from music at this current stage of my life. Sometimes all a person needs is that one missing piece, and this album was that piece for me.
With my latest broad musical obsessions being ambient (obviously), modern classical, and post-rock, I couldn’t have discovered Vines at a more perfect time as explained above. While I was initially sucked in purely for the ambient sound, I stayed and became deeply enamored with the wide stylistic range contained within I’ll be here. Cassie Wieland, the mind and force behind Vines, brings a unique twist on ambient music in how she incorporates influences from nearly every ambient-adjacent genre, including those I mentioned earlier in addition to jazz, electronic, shoegaze, and dream pop, all bundled up in one incredibly succinct and digestible musical package that elicits nothing but distilled catharsis.
Think of I’ll be here as a gorgeously depressing, less bloated version of M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming (for the record, I thoroughly enjoy that album by the way) with much more of an emphasis on the dreamy, pensive soundscapes as opposed to cheerful pop bangers. The album is made up a handful of ‘core’ tracks (“Evicted”, “King of swords”, and “Tired”) surrounded by interludes-but-not-really that inject even more flavor, depth, and melancholy. The aforementioned tracks feature Wieland’s vocals that utilize vocoder effects, which I generally find to be hit or miss, but Vines’ implementation of them is masterfully executed in how it drapes the already somber tone of the music in even more doom and gloom. The soothing vocalizations blend seamlessly into the mix, never serving as a focal point but rather as yet another intricately textured layer within the albums already immersive instrumental repertoire.
While brief, the shorter tracks each have their own distinctive personalities, such as “We’ve made it this far” with the swirling saxophone akin to what you’d hear from Colin Stetson or “Omw” with the twinkling piano over the top of weeping string accompaniments. The grainy pitter-patter heard on “Happy is hard” beautifully contrasts the ethereal beauty of “Keep driving” as the tender vocalizations glisten and wane. The title track ends the record on a triumphantly serene and uplifting note with a snare drum roll, frosty synths, and more heavenly vocals that reassure the listener that everything will turn out alright in the end and that there is purpose in the pain.
Although realistically it was by pure chance, I feel like it was destiny that I would come across Vines’ music given how it makes me feel something so precise yet simultaneously ambiguous, something no other artist or sound has ever quite touched to a similar degree. Of course, there are countless other songs, albums, and musicians whose work holds immense emotional weight in their own rights, but they often tie themselves to a specific feeling, memory, or chapter in one’s life. Whereas the amorphous nature of Vines’ music transcends all that in how it brings out all the grief and heartache (I mean all of it) that I’ve experienced throughout my life and by extension, all the love and happiness as well.
Admittedly, I’m the farthest thing from a spiritual individual that one can be, yet Vines’ I’ll be here somehow evokes a sense of stillness and presence that feels sacred in its own right. It is the type of album that can be interpreted and perceived differently from one listener to another, and for me, it is a subtle reminder that love and loss are one and the same and that neither would exist without the other; grief is a gift, a blessing disguised as a curse after all. I find an immense amount of solace knowing that this album exists and will always be there waiting for me as needed, as if it is always whispering to my subconscious ‘I’ll be here‘.
