Airborne
OCTOBER 28, 2020
JULETTA
The working title for “Airborne” was “Landlocked”. Throughout the process of creating If I Never Hit Land, I lost touch with myself and honestly forgot why I was doing it. When I decided to pursue music as a career, my relationship with music itself became toxic for a while. I placed so much pressure on its success, but I was never satisfied with what I made.
Because of that, “Airborne” was created painfully, and the song ended up being really representative of my headspace at the time. I’ve always been fixated on skydiving because I’m terrified of planes, and this particular image of falling out of a plane was stuck in my head ever since I had flown home to California for the winter. When I’m on a plane, I obsess over trying to control the situation, through superstitious habits like drumming my thumb on my saint christopher, or planning x,y and z escape routes in case something happens. It gives me some sense of control over the situation, but it also reinforces a bad ideology that I am responsible for everything I encounter. And it’s not just when I’m on planes.
“Airborne” is really about surrender. When I let go of trying to control the outcome of something and instead focus on my input only, that’s when I’m most aligned with myself and happiest. In any situation, you get to choose whether to be landlocked or airborne, tumbling to your death or literally flying for fleeting seconds.
ISHAN
Juletta and I traveled to Kirkwood, CA to work on some songs for the album, and that’s where “Airborne” came from. Kirkwood is a quaint ski town, nestled on the bottom of a mountain, surrounded by deep, beautiful snow covered woods. Airborne was made slowly, methodically, and to me juxtaposes the peace of the external with the pain of the internal.
