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Wanna go to the beach? Listen to Graduation’s “Double Vision”

Release date: November 16th, 2018

Dan Ray November 17, 2018
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Wanna go to the beach? Listen to Graduation’s “Double Vision” November 17, 2018

Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).

Photo courtesy of Graduation

In Graduation’s newest single, “Double Vision,” you can hear frontman Adam Piddington’s San Diego roots. As Piddington croons “I’ve got double vision” over and over throughout the chorus, his breezy vocals are layered with fuzzy synths and lighthearted guitar riffs that make you feel like you’re dancing on an invisible treadmill during a psychedelic sunset on a beach on the Cali coast.

The track starts with an electronic beat that sounds somewhere between a box fan and a tractor with a bag of glitz thrown on top, and when the verse comes in with Piddington’s easy-flowing vocals, it’s clear this whole track is going to feel like you’re trapped in a wonderfully but incessantly glittery snow globe — except instead of a wintertime scene, it’s something more akin to “Surfin’ USA.” It’s a glitter-time wonderland.

The chorus is the standout of the song, though. While not lyrically complex — “I’ve got double vision” is the only line — the oscillating downward slope of those aforementioned fuzzy synths paired with a trilling guitar line truly makes you want to stick out your tongue and turn around in circles, just hoping to get one sweet taste of confetti before it melts, travels down your esophagus, and turns you into a mystical rainbow-maned unicorn for the remainder of the three-minute and twenty-two-second track.

However, the song overall does have a fairly complex lyrical message — even with both verses being the same — displayed neatly through simple lyrics like “our eyes, they barely meet / before we see that things have changed.” The double vision conveyed here, then, seems to be a sort of duality of life view — being able to see both your past and present circumstances at the same time.

Most of “Double Vision” has this whooshing effect underneath the main instrumental lines that both whisks you into and away from the track, and the intro sets the listener up well for this expectation. The chorus ends the tune, and the whoosh is the last piece that lingers, but it doesn’t bookend the track the way that it should. Instead of a strong feeling of being pulled under the tide or away in the wind, the whoosh at the end is more or less the same as the whoosh throughout, and it feels more like your beach-globe simply vanished into thin air rather than being pulled into a different dimension where you can continue to ride the waves of life.

But, better to have and forget than to never have had, and the psychedelic snow globe “Double Vision” provides is the beach day every true Seattleite yearns for in rainy November.

8.7

Use of electro-instrumentation

 8.9/10

Bounce

 8.5/10

Lyricism

 8.0/10

Emotion elicited

 9.2/10

Comments

Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).