This Place to Call Home

Why Frank Ocean's Blonde is a New Year's Album

Frank Ocean’s Blonde album cover expanded with DALL-E 2 (Source)

Blonde is a New Year’s album.

Not in the sense that I think Frank Ocean was wearing big ass 2016 glasses and shooting off confetti in the studio while making it. But that, in 2018, I drove home from Parsons Avenue listening to Blonde in my car, singing, “That’s a pretty fucking fast year flew by,” as I reflected on a year that wasn’t fast at all. But on New Year’s Eve, everything before it feels like it moved in lightyears.

I had Instagram story archives and pictures in my camera roll to look back at, and I could scroll through those in seconds. But in reality, 2018 felt like the longest year of my life. After two years of living in Colorado Springs, moving there less than a week after graduating from college, I moved across the country again—this time to Columbus, Ohio to be closer to my longtime college girlfriend, Elizabeth.

That move came during a year where I was trying to sustain a poetry project I started after graduation. I moved to Colorado Springs for what I thought at the time was my “dream job.” It’s funny, or jarring, how quickly dreams can begin to resemble nightmares. A few years into living in Colorado Springs, my political and spiritual beliefs were changing and I didn’t quite know how to make sense of it. Outside of Elizabeth and her mom, and a few of the spots I had visited during trips to help alleviate the long distance, everything in Columbus was new to me. New roommates. New friends. New routine. And in that year, when much of my life felt foreign, I almost lost everything that meant the most to me.

In 2018, I also decided I could no longer stay at my job. My understanding of the world no longer aligned with that of the community I once called home. And it’s on New Year’s Eve, having just put in my two weeks’ notice and agreeing to join a company I believed would be my new dream job, that I pressed play on Blonde with all of these life experiences rushing to the surface.

Frank Ocean released Blonde in August 2016. The time of year when summer clenches to its last few moments of warmth before the air blows cool and autumn’s colors consume the leaves on their way to a wintry respite. Blonde, however, seems to transcend seasons. It is a meandering project, one that seems to mirror how new thoughts take shape in our minds. There is an attempt to capture the golden, or “blonded,” moments if you will. But still, reality rushes in.

“I’m just a guy, I’m not a god,” sings Frank Ocean on “Futura Free,” the album’s final track. “Sometimes I feel like I’m a god, but I’m not a god.”

While I try to hold space for reflection throughout the year, New Year’s is an opportunity for me to think about who I was at the start of the year and where I am now. How I changed, where I evolved. And even more so, the places where I’m still the same. The motions I still find myself in. “That’s the way every day goes,” sings Frank Ocean on “Pink + White.”

On New Year’s Eve in 2018, I posted on Instagram, “[Blonde] connects on a soul level because it feels like existence—in control, and out of control. Ethereal and eternal.” I think the word I meant instead of “ethereal” is “ephemeral.” I do that often. I get words in my head that sound alike with definitions that are sort of related, and I mistakenly substitute one for the other. I think that’s what I did by calling Blonde a New Year’s album. Blonde is a New Year’s album, and it’s not, just as it can be both ethereal and ephemeral.

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A post shared by Alex Lewis (@lewisalex10)

Blonde is a New Year’s album, which is to say it’s an album for when you’re at your most reflective. When you’re holding new beginnings and also endings that felt like they could have swallowed you whole. Because “every night fucks every day up,” but also “every day patches the night up.” That’s how I think about New Year’s. I reflect on everything I’ve been through. The times when "You showed me love, glory from above,” and when “It’s hell on Earth and the city’s on fire.” And I acknowledge, through everything, I’m still here.

At the end of my Instagram post on New Year’s Eve in 2018, I wrote, “I’ve asked questions this year I never thought I’d ask. But somehow it’s all-right. The bridge on ‘Self Control’ plays. I breathe. Still here.” I think I really meant the outro on “Self Control.” I told you I do that a lot. But the bridge is beautiful too:

“Sometimes you’ll miss it

And the sound will make you cry

And some nights, you’re dancing

With tears in your eyes”

Part of reflecting on the year I survived is accepting that, on some days, I didn’t know if I would. This year, I returned to therapy. And it’s been good to have a home away from home to talk about all the days, but especially the ones where I found myself with tears in my eyes.

Blonde is a New Year’s album in that it’s a new year, almost seven years since the album was released, and it’s still meeting me where I am. “You’ll have this place to call home always,” sings Frank Ocean on “Godspeed.” And I guess this album is a home. It feels like it anyway. Blonde is meant to be lived with just as much as it’s lived in. A reminder of what once was with an open door towards what and who we can become. On “Ivy,” Frank sings, “I ain’t a kid no more, we’ll never be those kids again.” And as sad as it can be to reflect on how few responsibilities I had as a child compared to everything I have to give my time to now, I find hope in Frank’s words on “White Ferrari” although I don’t know if I’m supposed to. In the song’s final verse, he sings, “Clearly, this isn’t all that there is.”

Ryan Breaux & Frank Ocean (Photo: @blondedocean/twitter)

New Year’s is looking back and it’s also imagining all that there can be. Three years ago, and almost four years to the day that Frank Ocean released Blonde, his little brother, Ryan [Breaux] Moore, tragically died in a car accident. Many know Ryan from participating in the interview on “Futura Free” where he has some of the last words on Blonde: “I don’t know, there’s a lot of things that you could do.” A year is a clean slate, and so is each moment. As harmful institutions work to convince us that this is the way it’s always been, and this is the way it will always be, I choose to think about what’s possible. All that we could do. All that we could build. And in that, how we might be transformed in the process.

I think that’s the beauty of Blonde. Frank Ocean made an album specific to his memories and experiences. And in that, he made an album we can find ourselves in. An album that can be what we need it to be for whatever time we’re in.

Blonde is a New Year’s album. And it’s also a fall equinox album. And it’s also a summer heartbreak album. And when I’m done listening, I say to myself, “That’s a pretty fucking fast year flew by.”

And yes it was.

And no it wasn’t.

And I’ll have this place to call home always.

Always.