How Owl City Saved My Life in College
This one's for the Millennials: thoughts on synesthesia, synth-pop, and breaking the dark enchantment.
I remember the exact moment Owl City entered my life.
It was 2009, which means I was 21. Some friends were over for dinner, and we were in that sweet afterglow hour between dinner and dessert, lounging on the floor in my bedroom and jamming with musical instruments. (These were our musical friends, so this was common.)
“You have to hear this guy,” said my friend Aubrey, turning on the song Meteor Shower as loudly as my subwoofer could handle. Aubrey is a professional violinist, so I usually trust her taste. The speaker shook the room, vibrating from the bass line that hits during the first chorus as chimes shimmer like falling stars.
I was smitten. Mesmerized, enchanted, absolutely hooked.
In the coming days, I fell head over heels for Adam Young, the multi-instrumentalist behind the electronic, synth-pop music project Owl City,1 who sang about fireflies, vanilla twilights, and just about every major world city. He was such a poet in the way he spun words together like cotton candy and made you feel something good. You didn’t just hear his lyrics—you could also taste and smell them.
I’ve often wondered if I have synesthesia. I don’t know for sure, but I find it fascinating. People with synesthesia (often creative types and/or neurodivergent individuals) experience a crossover in senses when one sensory or cognitive pathway is stimulated, leading to an experience of a different sensory or cognitive pathway.2 They can smell colors or see sounds. The lines blur between sensory inputs, making the world a more vivid place. According to Psychology Today, artists like Vincent Van Gogh may have had this. Young’s music was an escape and a doorway into a lovely, beautiful beyond. But it was more than just dreamy soundscapes or clever lyrics that captured my imagination. (Or, yes, Young’s cute smile and swoopy emo hair.) It was also what was happening inside of me the year Owl City entered my life. This deeply vivid yet optimistic music was an antidote for my depression—a patch of blue sky—and it just may have saved my life as a young, twenty-something battling mental illness.
People teased me for liking Owl City, labeling the music as “fluff” and too saccharine. But I didn’t care. Hope finds us in unexpected forms, and I felt alive while listening to Owl City—something I did not feel many other days. No matter how sad or empty I was in those college years, I always came to the other side of a long walk lifted by these sonic landscapes.
“Emotional honesty” was a high value for many Millennials. If this generation of question-askers hadn’t challenged Christian Evangelicalism’s cultural norms, speaking openly about previously taboo topics like politics, sex, church leadership, art, and mental health, GenZ would likely have inherited a very different society.
Most of my English peers at the private Christian university we attended (at least the hipsters) preferred grittier, confessional music with a strong emphasis on emotional honesty and existentialism. I’m thinking of Mumford and Sons, Noah Gundersen, Sufjan Stevens, etc. And I understand why—growing up with radio-friendly CCM (Contemporary Christian Music), which only scratched the surface of the human experience and often tied complex feelings into a nice little bow, my peers had big questions and music that came up wanting.
If art is meant for anything, it’s to excavate and express the depth of human experience. And if English majors are known for anything, it’s their very high BS detectors.
[Side note: Josh Garrels’ album Love & War & the Sea in Between may have single-handedly changed the landscape and reputation of religious music for my generation with his brilliant lyrical poetry and non-traditional approach to faith themes.]
I, too, fine-tuned my BS detector while in college. But while my friends were listening to Sufjan and mewithoutYou, I ran laps around campus, trying to outrun my troubled mind in the company of Owl City. At least once a day, I stole away from the kaleidoscope of students and went on long runs to untangle my thoughts and emotions. A bike trail circled Lake Jessup—the friendly name for a pond of algae-infused water that dried up each summer. It was the furthest away you could get from school without using a car, and one day I followed it out to the farthest boundary. Each step pulsed with energy along the trail as the techno beat of “Cave In” synchronized with my footsteps. Muscle tension released through my body as I walked. I especially liked that one line that always made my mouth water:
Swallow a drop of gravel and blacktop
‘cause the road tastes like wintergreen
the wind and the rain smell of oil and octane
mixed with stale gasoline
Alice was our lead Creative Writing faculty, hosting classes that were more like group therapy. Students either saw her as a heretic or their spiritual mother. There was no in between. Legend had it that no one received a grade lower than an A because she was more concerned with who you were becoming than how well you could follow rules.
The one assignment I do remember was our Desert Island Notebook. In it, we had to write 100 poems by hand. This was Alice’s way to get the poetry into our bones. At the time, I wasn’t familiar with many popular modern poets like Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry, so when my hand started to cramp after copying down every haiku I could find on Poem Hunter, I began copying song lyrics. I penned the lyrics to Owl City’s discography (among other artists), which, at the time, stopped with All Things Bright and Beautiful.
Though I couldn’t feel my hand for days afterward, I had become one with this poetry through the experience of writing it down, one word at a time, line by line. I can still see the words inked on the leaves of a turquoise notebook that I probably threw out somewhere between my poetic genius stage and my minimalism stage.
Owl City became the through-line to my college years, lifting my spirit above sadness.
My senior year, I did my capstone project on the works of Frederick Buechner, Andrew Peterson, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Owl City. The project was anchored in Tolkien’s essay, On Fairy-Stories and Buechner’s book, Telling the Truth: The Gospel As Comedy, Tragedy, and Fairy Tale. Both make the case for art as healthy escapism. In his essay, Tolkien explores the role of imagination in literature and eloquently undercuts the mistaken nature of real life. While some modernists in his era viewed escapist literature—fairy tales and myths—as a cheap way out of reality, Tolkien viewed it as nobly reaching for a world that transcended 1940s motorcars. It was a “real life” filled with higher and more enduring qualities. Something like heaven.
This capstone project was my response to my generation’s existentialism. I didn’t know a lot, but I knew this: In Christ, we cannot look away from darkness (“the truth will set you free”); and yet, if we only look at darkness long enough, it will eat us alive.
My senior year was not easy. Amidst all the faith questions and never-ending bibliography citations, I watched a family friend go into cardiac arrest across the table during our shared birthday lunch. She collapsed into the seat in front of me, and after calling 911, I watched the medics tear off her blouse and strap her to an EKG on the restaurant floor. For the next week, she was in a coma before coming back to life. This was a miracle. But I had seen a woman’s heart stop, and that is no small thing. This happened during my Tuesday afternoon capstone class. When I arrived late to campus that day, trembling, I waited outside the stucco walls and was later met by my classmates, who enveloped me with prayer and compassion.
This difficult year was wedged between other difficult years marked by significant trauma and loss. I am not sure where I would be had my friend Aubrey not introduced me to the music of Owl City.
“Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.”3
The works of Buechner, Tolkien, Peterson, and Young hinge on the idea of breaking the dark enchantment. Tolkien wrote during a naturalistic era, not only after the wake of the Industrial Revolution but during the popularity of Darwinism, atheism, and scientific discoveries. He and the Inklings saw a renewed need for high fantasy in modern literature as a way to re-mythologize a demythologized world. This is what inspired classics like The Lord of the Rings and Narnia. These stories were intended to break open the prison doors into the Greater Reality beyond.
Reality is a lovely place, Young sings in The Real World: but I wouldn’t want to live there.
It’s a courageous thing to reach for hope when you suffer from anxiety, depression, or loneliness, and Young carried many of his own demons (here’s looking at you, early 2000s blogs!). Some of his work deals with heavy themes, like This Isn’t the End. But his lyrics are filled with wonder for the world we live in and a longing for one we can’t fully see. For Young, musical escapism wasn’t naïvety. He knew a secret many of us forget: wonder, whimsy, and delight are as necessary as breath. They are also the antidote to despair.
Saccharine or not, Owl City saved this college girl’s life. And I’m not the only one who feels this way. Just read the comments section of his music videos on YouTube, and you’ll find an immense listenership of Millennials who encountered these songs at a pivotal time in their life and were never the same. Amidst the clever rhymes and whimsy, these synth-pop soliloquies pointed to a true joy and a high beauty forever beyond the reach of darkness.4
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Owl City is also categorized as electronica, synth-pop, dream pop, indietronica, and CEDM.
Psychology Today Staff, "Synesthesia," Psychology Today, accessed April 24, 2025, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/synesthesia.
J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien on Fairy-Stories, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson (London: HarperCollins, 2014).
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988).
As a fellow synesthete whose life was saved by Owl City (except in middle school), this post has my heart. 🌠
So good!