There's always a lot to thinking about when you're either sinking or treading water. There's that fear of what's below your dangling and vulnerable feet. Not only are there those beasts with rows and rows of teeth knifing through the water or the dirt, but there are all those sunken ships and buried bones. Then there's all that's ahead of you - sometimes miles and miles of more water or miles and miles of hard to fool and conquer road. It all but makes your head crack into a thousand pieces and fall to the drain in surrender. When you're stuck trying to find love or trying to keep love, when you're attempting to finally get yourself out of neutral, the hands on the clock are held into place on the wall and it saps you completely. Much of the sinking or treading water tends to happen in one's more youthful years, when less rhyme and many fewer reasons seem to be making themselves known. It's that period of time that stretches a night at its seams and makes a body hope for different kinds of days.
Shawn Fogel of the New Jersey group Golden Bloom has made it both his work and his creative context to dig into the recent past to explore the feelings and fears that preoccupied him. Some of them are likely still present, just in more of a dulled sense. He finds a kind of resiliency in the contours of the song, "You Go On And On," one that touches on the ways that hopes and dreams find footings or tragedy as they get spent. He sings, "Back in the days when you acted young/There was life in your lungs and the posters you hung on your wall/Displayed the life you were living for/Behind every door was a little more/But today you see it in front of you/On the verge and you don't know what to do/Are you fighting the fears that you feel inside/Are you looking for the truth or a place to hide." The moments are still bright and the way that Fogel writes and sings about them, they've left impressions that don't seem as if they've been completely resolved. There's a feeling that things are mostly alright, that they could be a lot worse. He sings frequently about different doors - opening and closing - and what could be there behind them. The thoughts are frequently tinged with hopefulness, like all of this was meant to be, for the better. It's good to be young, feeling so awkwardly alive and fired up about it, bummed out by it. It's even better to be older and a little more certain if you're sinking or treading water or feeling it all stabilize to a better point.