ABOUT Plunges Into the Deep End of “Fortunate Islands”

Recorded during the height of pandemic lockdowns and released in the winter of 2020, “Fortunate Islands” is ABOUT’s most conceptual, challenging project to date.

“Sunny side is everywhere, but soaked me is not too bad,” ABOUT reasons on his rangy double album “Fortunate Islands”, a sprawling 14-track body of work that drowns you in its vivid storytelling. 

Many of the tracks on this album have the ambiguous, mysterious feel of poetry, and on one particular track, “DIVE”, ABOUT addresses a dead friend as he sits on the edge of the ocean. “Hold the mind and the night at hand’s end/ Closed many nights,” he sings softly. “Let’s swim.” Water in all of its forms, from uncontrollable tears to the crush of ocean waves, is a major theme of “Fortunate Islands”. This is a wet album: both in its visuals and in its simmering sexuality. ABOUT likes to swim in uncharted territories here. 

Recorded during the height of pandemic lockdowns and released in the winter of 2020, “Fortunate Islands” is ABOUT’s most conceptual, challenging project to date. It retains the handwritten stream of conscious sentiment of his most popular music, while shaping into some of his most visceral in his unflinching portrayal of pain. 

“If you create horrible stories, it makes you feel better,” he told me when we first met earlier this year. I found his presence to be comforting and enchanting, and we hit it off with our shared horror stories. “You don’t need to be happy. You don’t need to be sexy. You don’t need to be in a relationship or have a lover. Be too much with me in my music and with my lyrics.” 

I took his words as an invitation and began listening to “Fortunate Islands” this summer. The series’ artwork immediately intrigued me because of the wry paintings of the singer. Part 1, subtitled “Entrance”, depicts the singer staring at the viewer. His face is as long as his eyes are heavy, as if weighed down by foreboding thoughts. He's dressed as a true island boy in a red floral print shirt, but his countenance suggests he’s there for other reasons. A moon hangs above his head, with palm trees and mountains in the background. Part 2, subtitled “Exit”, sees ABOUT walking away from the viewer; we only see the back of his head as he leaves the island. The moon is gone, replaced by a blank, endless sky. 

In a short poem accompanying “Entrance”, ABOUT wrote:

“Do our sadness and depression only exist for the sake of happiness?

If the entrance to happiness is sadness, then there must also be

an entrance to sadness somewhere.

From the entrance to these islands all the way to the exit.”

But where are the Fortunate Islands? What did ABOUT create in these songs that speaks to depression and isolation? “I hope traveling together with my music will help resolve,” he wrote in the closing lines of the poem, “some of the questions of depression and sadness.” 

Summertime sadness. Ice cream that melts on your lips on a hot day. An illusion of love that only leaves you feeling cold. These are the themes on Fortunate Islands. In pop culture, summer is often portrayed as a metaphor for youth, the heat and sun representing a burgeoning sexuality. But in ABOUT’s universe, the season’s heat is suffocating. It takes away his love and represses him. “The summertime is mean,” he sings in “Summertime” because it ruined his relationships, before adding, “Our love is not our love.” 

Listen to enough of ABOUT’s music and you’ll hear common themes throughout each album. His vocabulary is well-versed in what it means to be depressed, but also in meatier subjects, like how it feels to never have access to a secret handbook on creating intimate relationships.

For years, ABOUT told me, he didn’t have a single friend. This would have far reaching consequences, bludgeoning his ability to meet people or be himself for years.  It was shameful to not understand how to get close to people, and like a feral cat, ABOUT would often seek out the solace of isolation. But this was largely a protective measure. 

“The reason I really loved isolating myself in school was because there was no personal place for me at home,” he told me in March. “I didn’t understand why my parents were divorced; why people bullied me; why my classmates didn’t like me. I felt like I had a crack in my brain.” 

Fortunate Islands is where ABOUT traveled to find the other side of sadness. Here, he reasoned, maybe he could move past a shattered heart. His entrance to the island comes at a beckoning. “Oh ice cream man in the town,” he sings in the opening track of the series. “Give me your cold love/ I’ll melt you all night.” Iciness prevails in the entrance of Fortunate Islands, but ABOUT is determined to warm up his love. 

“Beyond the cold summer,” he whispers to a lover in the second track, “I’m going to find you/ Come with me now/ Close your eyes and let’s leave.” 

On “Make It Cold”, ABOUT demands that if his lover is going to come back, then he must “throw away your leftover heart”. ABOUT admits that he’s been “made a fool” by love, but he’s determined to see their destructive relationship through to the bitter end. “Leave the last moment for me,” ABOUT asks. “Pull the trigger with closed eyes/ I will not allow you back.”

ABOUT is aware that these are heavy topics, but he’s never been an artist who shies away from portraying themes that might make him seem absurd or crazy. This is partly what makes his work feel so relevant. He writes for the underdog and, specifically in his new single “Coward”, ABOUT reminds us that he’s stronger than we might think. “I’m not a coward,” he says – but it’s okay if you are one. For the past decade, ABOUT has played on these tensions of toxicity and eroticism: the erosion of love (“Ashtray”), the painful reckoning with your past self (“Childhood Bullies”), and the allure of destructive relationships (“wHy DiD U?”) are all molded into his self-assured songwriting. 

The centerpiece of “Fortunate Islands” is a song that feels almost sparse and restrained on an album full of heavy feelings. “Tonight Is Empty” doesn’t follow the narrative-driven structure of the album’s other songs. Instead, it reads like poetry as ABOUT questions whether he should disappear. “I am contained even in the scattering sounds,” he observes. “But no one listens.” He ponders difficult questions, like how much he’s changed since he was a kid when he was isolated in his room and hating himself. “Did I grow up?” ABOUT asks later in the song, or is he still a child looking to find a home? On this EP, as he plans for his exit, ABOUT is searching for the love and stability he never had in his adolescence. 

“Fortunate Islands” continues to dive for rich material further into the album. “People Have Not Been” unflinchingly recounts the bullies ABOUT faced growing up who pushed him into a shell. “People have not been kind to me/ No matter what I do,” he sings devastatingly over a guitar, “People have not been easy on me/ No matter how I try.” 

If the “Entrance” to “Fortunate Island” feels like a last ditch effort to save love, the “Exit” feels sharper and hotter in ABOUT’s decision to abandon it. “Evening opening and closing my eyes is hard for me,” he tells us near the end of “People Have Not Been”. But ABOUT is careful to not let anyone exploit his sadness. He reminds us that he’s sensitive, for sure, but that allows him to feel everything; something that maybe gives him a more empathetic worldview. 

“Don’t call my sadness the way you want,” he advises on the album’s closer “Singforth Happiness For Me”. “Meaningless words aren’t meaningless to me/ Due to your words, I am easily swayed.” The song builds as ABOUT embraces the pathos of trauma and, finally, self-care. We can all live in fear, he begins to understand, but eventually we have to wish for healing. “Call forth love for me,” he asks us. “Keep your non-disappearing heart.” 

ABOUT is not naive about how subjective happiness is. Life is cyclical. The depression will eventually return and our hearts will get broken again. People will disappoint and hurt us. ABOUT knows all of this. But the boy who entered the island as a nihilist is now willing to sincerely examine himself and to send up a sincere hope for love. 

“Are our sadness and depression waiting for us behind happiness/ If so, should I stop this step?” ABOUT asks in the poem for “Exit”. Music, he decides, is how we can move through depression. Rather than turn away from it, he chooses to plunge deeper and find what secrets we’re missing on the ocean floor. On “Fortunate Islands” ABOUT has transformed into a dolphin, a musical creature able to dive into the darkest depths of the ocean and return to the surface with stories of what we’ve missed below.