The first time I can remember being attached to music was with Daft Punk. I had always enjoyed music, I used to rank every weekly top 40 chart from preference on sheets of paper when I was bored, but the first time I can remember true attachment to one artist and one album was with Daft Punk. I’ve wanted to write about the movie they scored, my favourite movie of all time, Tron Legacy, for years and years but it encapsulates too much of myself and my experiences with art for me to summarise in even 10,000 words, and for a long time, I felt the same was true with Daft Punk. How am I supposed to write about a band that changed the way I heard the world? I had heard Harder Better Faster Stronger and likely some other songs from their 2000s output before I saw Tron Legacy in IMAX in December 2010, but I had no association with Daft Punk as an artist or as a sound beyond the robot aesthetics and the fact that they were composing a soundtrack to a movie I begged my parents to take me to. Similar to the lack of real knowledge I had about Tron or its cast beforehand, I walked into Tron Legacy just wanting an experience, a fun time at the movies that I could tell my friends about and think about with quiet comfort.
There wasn’t a part of me that realised that movies or music could hit differently than just entertaining, comforting things at the time. It was about the year before I started to take movies very seriously, beginning a path that would define my life forever, and about 4 years before I got my first Spotify account and started truly thinking about the wide scope of music and exploring all the labyrinths it’d take me down. This one night, just a random December where my incessant nagging led to my parents letting me come with them on a friends’ night to the movies ended up forging the path where my life would go down, what art would truly mean something to me, the first glimpse of those indescribable feelings that I became a writer to try and articulate. I sat down in that IMAX theatre and a few hours later, I felt something unlike anything I’d ever felt. It entranced me entirely, creating memories and sensations that I still find difficult to talk about.
While it was a decade ago now and a lot of the precise details of the experience, I remember so vividly the feeling of watching Sam Flynn ride his motorcycle inside The Grid for the first time. After several minutes of overwhelming colour and abstract alienation, he gets to find brief peace and solace within this digital construct, where time completely slows down and all that can be heard is the subtle notes of Daft Punk’s The Game Has Changed. He runs down a path of luminescent blue and watches as this motorcycle constructs in mid air around him, before the sudden drums kick in and time speeds up again. It lasts for about 15 seconds and is the first major moment where the film’s sound mix isolates everything but the soundtrack, all you see and hear is this one beautiful grace note, even in the midst of cataclysmic terror. It is my favourite moment in any film. So much of that transcendence came from Daft Punk, more of it than I’ll ever be able to articulate, even after all my years of trying.
In those months where I didn’t have the DVD to replay over and over again, a disc I insisted my mum take me to pick up the day it released, the soundtrack was my endless comfort. On my pride and joy, a tiny red iPod nano that registered my steps and contained an array of illegally downloaded music, the Tron Legacy soundtrack album was playing constantly. Every note of that soundtrack is embedded perfectly within my brain from those years, from the time I was listening to it at New Year’s Eve at my grandparents’ house, to camping with my parents and listening to it secretly when I was supposed to be asleep. I’ve had plenty of transcendent experiences with music since but no album makes me feel more safe or elicits such intense emotions from me than Tron. It is the album that will define my life and is the first thing I go to whenever I’m recovering from a meltdown or trying to keep myself functioning in spite of grief. It’s still the album I listen to more often than any other and it made my favourite movie even more special to me.
I didn’t listen to or watch Tron constantly for a few years in my adolescence, I was trying to explore the depths of the film and musical canon and the older I got, the more fear that I felt that it wouldn’t be the same once I went back, that nostalgia had deceived me a little bit and those perfect feelings had faded. But in the midst of the hardest times in my life, I put on Tron Legacy again and as soon as those opening notes of The Grid started playing, I felt safe, like I was at home, that it was all going to be okay in the end. The film and the soundtrack have never left my side since, they remind me of the cosmic sense of significance and beauty that I often lose track of in the midst of depression and loss. Daft Punk gave me that, they gave me a feeling of security, as a scared boy, to a suicidal teen, to a heartbroken man, a feeling that will last me forever and will hopefully live on through my words when I’m no longer here.
I don’t know the right words to say goodbye to them. I don’t know if writing about all the nighttime journeys I’ve taken in the passenger side of my mum’s car, listening to Instant Crush as I stared out the window will help, or if talking about the joy on myself and my dad’s faces during the One More Time section in Mia Hansen-Love’s Eden will truly cement their impact on me. All I know is that throughout my life, whether I’ve been losing myself to Alive 2007 on Princes Avenue in Edinburgh, or rocking out to Homework in my own back garden, they’ve been right there to fill me with joy and pump me full of energy when it felt like I had none left. I have had many answers for my favourite band over the years, from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds to Radiohead to Big Time Rush, but the one that will always unite me and remind me of what music means, what it will always mean to me is Daft Punk.
I don’t know how to say goodbye, I’m terrible at it. It’s hard to accept that there will never be a moment where I hear new Daft Punk music for the first time again. There are still Mac Miller projects I’ve not heard all the way through to save them for the time where I need new music of his most, same with David Bowie and Prince and the other musical legends of my life who aren’t here anymore. While the situations are obviously different, it hurts to know that those days where I need new songs with the comfort of my favourite sounds aren’t going to be there. But the comfort of knowing I can go back to the memories that their existing music has already given me, and forge new ones with those familiar songs going forward is the most beautiful thing I can ask for now that they’re done.
Tonight, I was listening to One More Time while pacing and about halfway through, I got overwhelmed with emotion. I grabbed onto my headphones and held onto them tightly, trying to push the music closer to my ears as the tears started falling. I thought about my girlfriend’s illness, my parents’ divorce, the fragility of all my memories and how quickly everything can end. I sat slouched over and lost myself in the rhythms, in the repetition, in the energy. Then as soon as it ended, I decided to write this, to keep this memory alive, to immortalise it as it happened, as it felt, so that 20 years from now, I can read this and feel the same way. The songs that have been with me for as long as I can remember listening will never stop growing, never stop changing. A song that was made when I was a baby has now had countless impacts on my life and has already found another new meaning as Daft Punk make their final goodbyes. I haven’t watched the goodbye video but there’s a comfort of knowing that it’s there when I’m ready, when I am able to accept that just because the physical is gone, the digital isn’t. I don’t know if I’m going to be okay, but I know that no matter how I’m doing, that I’ll have Daft Punk’s music right there to make sure I’m taken care of. In the end, there’s nothing I can say that has more meaning than that. Thank you for everything, I could never ask for any more.
this is one of the best conveyed emotional testimonials for any art i have ever read, thank you for this logan 💓