Dissect - S10E9 - GONE GONE / THANK YOU by Tyler, The Creator

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

Our season-long analysis of IGOR continues with GONE GONE / THANK YOU, a gorgeous double song in which Tyler memorializes the time shared with his beloved before finally becoming at peace with moving on. Shop Season 10 merchandise here. Follow us on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. Host, EP, Writer: Cole Cuchna Writer: Camden Ostrander Audio Editor: Kevin Pooler Theme Music: Birocratic Recreations: Andrew Atwood Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Spotify, this is Dysect, long-form musical analysis broken into short, digestible episodes. This is episode 9 of our season-long examination of Tyler the creator's Igor. I'm your host, Cole Kushner. Last time on Dysect, we examined Igor's ninth track What's Good. It was there we heard Tyler embody the Igor alter ego, fully indulging in bravado and swagger in order to reclaim his autonomy in the aftermath of losing love. We also observe how this resurrection of sorts was framed within the album's recurring breathing motif, with Yee on Puppet telling Tyler to quote,

breathe on a song, which is followed directly by Tyler literally breathing throughout the second half of what's good. By the end of the song, though, Tyler's rhythmic breaths of effort and assertion turned to panting, as if he was out of breath. This change of breath clued us into the fact

that while Igor served a purpose, allowing him to regain his independence and break free from his crush, it's an identity and attitude that's ultimately unsustainable. Thus, the tone of the album shifts as it progresses into its next track. The subject of our episode today, Gone Gone Thank You. I don't know what's harder, letting go or just being okay with it.

Gone Gone Thank you was produced by Tyler Koma and features guest vocals by Cilo Green, LaRue, Jesse Wilson, Anthony Evans, Amanda Brown, and Tiffany Stevenson. Like every 10th track on a Tyler Project, Gone Gone Thank You is a double song, with the two songs separated by a slash mark in its title. After a brief drum intro, Gone Gone begins with a musical texture provided by three instruments, an acoustic guitar, a Rhodes keyboard,

and an arpegated synthesizer. On the second time around, Tyler layers two additional instruments, a lead guitar and a percussive woodblock. It's an incredibly unique musical texture, which for me resembles a warm summer's breeze at sunset. Once again, Tyler sings with a noticeably pitched up voice, which in this environment evokes a nostalgic,

adolescent-like innocence. He begins, comparing scars before dinner, jump off the roof into the mirror. Like so many of the lyrics on Igor, we are brought into a specific moment, one that feels too specific not to be true. We assume that mirror here is a description of a reflective body of water. Thus, we can imagine Tyler and his crush in their swim trunks, sharing the stories behind the scars on their bodies before jumping off a roof into a pool or a lake. It's an idyllic memory for Tyler, one that incorporates his love at the outdoors, his perpetual chase of the sun. There's a surrealness to describing a body of water as a mirror, evoking the dreamlike, majestic nature of pleasant memories replayed in our mind's eye. The mirror also adds to the reflective

theme of the track, with Tyler reflecting on himself, this relationship, and the lessons learned from the experience with his beloved. Scars here also evokes intimacy, physically with one's body, but also in knowing their emotional history, sharing with each other past events or relationships they've been hurt by. And it's here that we understand that we're currently witnessing Tyler develop a new scar as he begins the reflective process of healing after being wounded by this love lost. Tyler then describes this memory as the summer to his December, or providing warmth and light during an otherwise cold and dreary time. He then asked himself, was it my August? Shit, I don't remember. It would seem Tyler's being tongue-in-cheek here, as fans of Tyler know

the month that he wants to compare these moments to is November. From his 2017 Take me back to November Hawaiian shirts in the winter cold water, cold water, yeah, take me back to November. From his 2017 album Flower Boy, the song November used the month as a symbol for joy, with Tyler and his friends

sharing their quote unquote November memories, those specific moments that brought them happiness and fulfillment. In the song's chorus, Tyler wraps Take Me Back to November, Hawaiian shirts in the winter. It's an image of warmth during a historically cold month, a parallel to the feeling of summer in December,

we hear in Gondgon, providing more evidence of the thematic link between these two tracks. This climate analogy continues as Gondon picks up with its second verse. The separation of Tyler and his crush is compared to the migration pattern of birds. His crush flying south to seek warmer temperatures during cold months is akin to the idiom seeking greener pastures, while the bird going to leave the nest implies the two growing apart, just as a chick grows up and eventually leaves the nest. Wrapping the breakup in this metaphor seems to convey Tyler's feelings that things simply took their natural course, implying his acceptance of the situation and his own maturation to view the events somewhat objectively. Tyler then interjects, you're so chromatic.

The word chromatic relates to the word chroma, which refers to the purity and intensity of a color. High chroma colors look rich and full, while low chroma colors can look dull, or pale. Thus Tyler describing his crush as So Chromatic means he's full of color. It continues the album-long photograph motif Tyler has used to describe this relationship. From the I need to get her out of the picture of running out of time, she's not developed like we are of new magic wand and change the aperture of what's good. Your so chromatic thus binds the photo analogy with the ongoing memory motif, with Tyler describing how he remembers this person and their times together, how vivid and warm the mental photographs of his memories look and feel.

Chromatic is also a musical term, referring to the notes that fall outside a song's key signature. For example, gongons in the key of B major, which is comprised of these seven pitches. Anytime a note other than these seven is used in a song in B major, it's considered a chromatic note. And when you know, the line, you're so chromatic is sung over a B-dominant seventh chord, which contains the chromatic note A-natural.

regardless of whether this was coincidental or purposeful, this moment of a chromatic note being heard while Tyler says the word chromatic is a brief moment of text painting, when the music reflects the lyrics being sung. Tyler then concludes the verse with the touching, at least I had it, instead of never. Evoking the idiom better to have love and loss than to never have loved at all. This notion fits well into the verse's memory motif, as Tyler would not have these memories to reflect on without the experiences that birthed them. We might think about it parallel with the scar imagery that began the song. We often get scars doing the things we love. Tyler, for example, no doubt has scars from biking accidents, with biking being one of the things that brings him the utmost joy, one of the

things that for him makes life worth living. And so while the intense pain of a biking injury is awful in the moment, that pain is ultimately fleeting. And once healed, the scar represents a memory that helps tell the story of who you are. Tyler ends the verse by second. guessing his point of view, saying, or maybe I'm too dramatic. Maybe the intense emotions felt are an overreaction. Maybe he's attaching too much meaning to a flawed relationship. Maybe he's spending too much of his time living in the past, mourning something that's already flown south. As Gongon transitions into its hook, Tyler introduces a sample of the 2016 song, Hey Girl, by Colin Amori. Upon hearing this sample, we realized that the musical material of GonGon's introductory

verses were based on this song, making the transition from the original material to the sample extremely smooth. Recall Tyler pulled a similar move on the song Puppet, whose introductory verse material was original instrumentation based on Zarr's song today, the same song that's heavily sampled in Puppet's chorus. And also like Puppet, when we dig into the sample sources lyrics, we find thematic parallels with Tyler's original song. Perhaps the most direct parallel is in Hey Girls' outro, where Colin Amori repeatedly sings, It's All Over, My Darling Girl. This parting lyric about things being over is thematically at home and gone gone. But rather than interpolate the lyrics or melody of Hey Girl,

Tyler instead enlist singer Seelow Green to sing an original melody. It's an absolutely gorgeous marriage of harmony and melody, one that like a handful of moments on Igor might go overlooked by some due to its unorthodox instrumentation. But the beauty of this chorus is laid bare when we strip it down to just piano. Complementing this beautiful composition is Seelow Green's legendary soulful supremacist. a voice. Sealo is of course one half of Narls Barkley, a member of Goody Mob, and a prolific solo artist. It's clear that Tyler has been a fan of his for some time. Back in 2012, Tyler tweeted at Sealo, praising his song, Is It, from his now obscure 2010 mixtape stray bullets.

Then in 2013, Tyler tweeted his love for Seelow's song Scream from the Despicable Me Too soundtrack. Seelow enters Gone Gone singing, whether it's rain or shine, I know I'm fine for now. First we recognize the tight internal rhymes of shine and fine, as well as the sly wordplay on weather, meaning whichever of the two options, but also weather as in rain and sunshine. Drawing on the classic symbolism of rain to denote sadness and sunshine to denote happiness, Tyler's saying that either way he'll be fine, showing a newfound acceptance of the fate of this relationship. He's going to weather whatever weather comes his way, be it December or August or November. It continues the song's theme of things taking their natural course.

us and being okay with what fate has in store for us. See low then repeats, my love's gone, my love's gone. The repetition clues us in on the double meaning of the phrase. Tyler's love for this person is gone, and Tyler's love, his crush, has left him. Recall that Tyler also used the word gone repeatedly in the song New Magic Wand, referring to his wish that the girl be gone like magic. Tyler brings back the word gone, only now it denotes the loss of love, not the girl. It's another motivic thread in the fabric of Igor.

as we've witnessed Tyler do this same multi-layered use of recurring words and phrases many times on the album, from the numerous photo analogies, the running motif, the dualistic gun symbolism, and more. In the second half of the hook, Seelow sings, or maybe it's just a dream that I can't seem to wake up from. Again, the tight internal rhyme of dream and seam is mirrored from the first half of the hook, while thematically the line solidifies the surrealist dreamlike landscape of the song so far. Tyler is trapped in his memories of this relationship, and while the last provide pleasant feelings like dreams can, the fact that he's still reliving these past moments, still thinking about the crush, make these dreamlike memories feel inescapable, like a nightmare.

This is the paradox of feeling so often experienced in that in-between phase that follows the loss of love, where we work through letting go and being okay with it, precisely what Gerard Carmichael preface the song with. It's the nostalgic warmth of appreciation, felt simultaneously with the sorrow of loss and loneliness, a confusing dichotomous state that can feel comforting yet imprisoning, like a dream you can't wake up from. Following the hook, Gone Gone Explodes into an instrumental section that brings back the elements heard in the intro, as well as a few new instruments. Most noticeable are the drums, but there's also bass, piano, and a new synth lead. After this explosive instrumental section, Tyler re-interes the song to sing a brief verse.

He begins with the potent line, I know love is all I got. After the emotional whirlwind of desire and obsession and anger and hurt and frustration, Tyler is in the end left with only love, a beautiful admission. Above all, love is what once binded them together, and the hope for any failed relationship is that eventually both people end up returning to a place of love, where they want the best for each other as their life paths diverge, as the once-beloved fades from view in the rear window of their past. This idea of wanting the best for your former love informs the next line,

I just hope to God she got good taste, could put you on some shit you never seen, could play a couple songs that you could dance to, I hope you know she can't compete with me. Tyler is essentially describing all the things he could be providing for him, hoping this girl has the ability to give him a life that equals or exceeds the one that they could have together. We know Tyler prides himself in his taste, for food, for travel, for fashion, for music, cars, bikes, architecture, art, and more. There's clearly some residual resentment in this passage, as he's once again able to articulate that post-breakup simultaneity of emotion, where we're flooded with so many competing feelings. Motivocally, could play a couple songs that

you could dance to stands out, because as we discussed on I Think, Tyler used dance to envelop the euphoria of falling in love and the freedom felt in the shared experience of movement. It would seem then that Tyler snuck in a bit of a flex, as could play a couple songs you could dance to, refers both to his taste in music and his ability to make it, as in he'll literally play a dance song he wrote for him, an ability the girl is unlikely to match. And it's here that we notice the danceability of even the current song, as Gone Gone continues with the repetition of the chorus, only this time with the danceable four on the floor drums behind it. After the chorus, Gone Gone Dips into a post chorus, where Tyler repeats, You kept me going, the Band-Aid is falling off now,

and then ends, going away, and now I'm scarred for life. Band-Aids offer temporary protection for wounds. they occupy the phase between being injured and being healed. Thus, You Kept Me Going implies the guy helped Tyler while he suffered some kind of wound, just like a Band-Aid. It's a somewhat confusing analogy at first, since the wound of this album has also been the guy. How could the guy be both the wound and the Band-Aid? Well, recall that Tyler actually made a similar dichotomous analogy on a boy as a gun. There he rapped, how came you the best to me?

I know you the worst for me. Boy, you sweet as sugar, diabetic to the first degree. Also recall that song's central gun metaphor was also dualistic, as the boy kept him safe, but was also the source of danger. The crush being both the bandaid and the wound is consistent with these analogies. And so at this point in the narrative, it makes sense that the bandaid is falling off. The relationship has run its course. This leads to the line, going away, and now I'm scarred for life.

It's a nice call back to the song's start, where Tyler discussed comparing scars before dinner, grounding the song in the permanency of our experiences. We also noticed the slide double use of going in this couplet, where You Kept Me Going has a positive connotation, while going away has a negative connotation, continuing the song-long expression of simultaneous competing emotions. Gone-Gone then continues into an extended bridge, one that Tyler was particularly proud of,

as he tweeted, quote, 302 on Gone Gone, man, I mean, come on, beautiful, absolutely beautiful. It keeps slanting down. That feeling is, I'm not sure what that is, need a four-minute version of just that, unquote. This slanting down Tyler refers to as a musical technique called sequencing. A technique will hear and dissect right after the break. Welcome back to dissect. Before the break, we had reached Gon Gon's bridge section, a bridge Tyler described as slanting down, which refers to how the

harmony continually descends, moving lower and lower. In this extended bridge section, Tyler employs a musical technique called sequencing, which is what it's called when a musical passage is repeated at a higher or lower pitch. In this case, the musical passage being repeated is a two-court progression accompanied by a descending melody. This passage is then repeated, only now a whole step lower. It's then repeated again, now a half-step lower. And finally, one more time, a whole step lower. This is what Tyler meant by this bridge slanting down, as the passage is sequence lower and lower. Often extended sequences like this one are used to smoothly transition from one key signature to another, or to move into another musical section entirely, both of which are true

on Gongon, because when Tyler re-enters the song to rap, we realize the musical landscape has changed quite a bit from the guitar-driven texture of the verse and chorus, and we've long departed from the song's original key of B major. Tyler begins his verse rapping, it's poison in that gumbo. Continuing the dualism of the bridge, Gumbo is a comfort food, a rich eclectic dish that should bring solace, yet Tyler's is spiked with poison. In other words, the same thing that comforts him is also killing him, which is in line with the Band-Aid, gun, and sugar diabetes analogies we discussed earlier. There's also a chance that Tyler is referencing an image from the back cover of the album

M.F. Food by one of his favorite artist M.F. Doom. It's on that back cover that we see a masked cartoon doom pouring what looks like poison from a test tube into a food can labeled Gumbo. Doom's also wearing a red vest with a pink long-sleeved undershirt, a unique color combination that may have provided inspiration for Igor's unique pink and red suit. While we plan to get more into Doom's influence on Igor in our finale episode, the possible reference here is something we wanted to point out as we head toward that discussion. Now, Tyler continues the verse saying, emotion, feel dumbero. While reflecting on his behavior during this relationship, Tyler's feeling dumb, clumsy, and embarrassed, the reasons for which he'll elaborate on in a moment. The comparison with the clumsy Dumbo cartoon elephant is clever in that

it also references Tyler's self-described big ears. He then plays on the song's hook, My Love is Gone, saying Ask me Where My Love Go, That Bitch Walked Outside the Front Door. Tyler's wording here recalls the phrase Sometimes you've got to close the door to open a window, as we understand that his love leaving

opens up future opportunities for new connections, although hearing that in the moment of loss usually isn't all that helpful. There's a bit of a twist in the following line where Tyler says, knock, knock, knock, knock, as if someone is knocking at a front door. If his love or crush is the one that walked outside the front door,

it's unlikely he'd be the one knocking. We might then suspect that Tyler's once again using the double meaning of my love. As he described in Puppet, Tyler's the one knocking at his crush's door, but no one is home because his love, his crush, is gone. He then employs another album-related callback saying, I'm not shocked, I brought this on me.

It's my fault, you go and leave. Of course, this is referencing the hook of earthquake when Tyler repeatedly saying, Don't leave, it's my fault. Just as fault played off the fault lines of earthquakes, I'm not shocked plays off aftershocks, smaller earthquakes following the main shock of a large earthquake. The verse then continues with an extended metaphor

in which Tyler finally articulates where he went wrong. He begins, The Weatherman told me it wasn't raining, my stupid ass brought umbrellas. I got a glimpse of your cloud and felt better. Tyler here admits to directly rejecting better judgment, believing it was going to rain when told it wasn't. In other words, he believed there was more to this relationship than the reality of it,

even when he, his friends, or even the crush himself was telling him otherwise. Tyler directly comparing the crush to a cloud, which has the potential for rain, means that the potential for love was there. Like the Band-Aid analogy, this made Tyler feel temporarily better, but that rain or love never came. Instead, as Tyler says, it's 90 degrees and all the tricks up my sleeve is drenched in sweat and delusion because I jet to conclusions. Ultimately, Tyler was wrong.

Every cloud doesn't mean it's going to rain. And just like someone carrying an umbrella and wearing a rain jacket on a hot day, Tyler was oblivious and overzealous in his infatuation with this guy, scaring him away and leaving Tyler alone, drenched not in rain but his own embarrassed sweat, holding the umbrella and feeling Dumbo. Notably, Tyler says, I jet to conclusions,

further developing the fact that he rushed and over-obsessed about the potential of this relationship, like someone seeing one small cloud and expecting a thunderstorm. We should also point out the nice rhyme density of the line, drenched in sweat and delusion because I jet to conclusions, with the short one-syllable sweat and jet, complementing the three-syllable rhymes of delusion and conclusion. This kind of humility, shame, honesty, and ownership of things he did wrong feels like a big step in Tyler's emotional journey post-fallout. Truth was, it wasn't just the girl that spoiled their potential. It wasn't just that the

crush was uncomfortable with his own sexuality. Tyler had a part in things not working out too. and its transparent omission of this displays his evolving maturity, something that continues in the second half of the verse. I get to conclusion, you got your thing, I got nothing, but memories, I know your secrets, nigga, I'm not better on nothing, I understand that,

everybody making a choice according to plan, and we had two different blueprints, but understood and fluent, you opened up early on, I thought I had a permit, we started building the bridge, and turned it into a fence, and my building got toward that.

I don't know because of your new tenant, I'll just bob some new shit, never down with a lease. You never lived in your truth. I'm just happy I lived in it, but I finally found peace. So peace. Tyler slows his flow to say, you got your thing, I got nothing but memories. Undoubtedly, your thing here refers to the girl, while the mention of his memories nods to the memories reflected in the beginning of this song. The music then cuts out temporarily, allowing the line, I know your secrets, to stand out in its sudden isolation. It articulates a theme we know well at this point, the guy's insecurity with his

attraction to men, and the fear of expressing these feelings publicly. We recall the many analogies Tyler used throughout the album to describe this dynamic, from the mask of running out of time and new magic wand, to the face-hiding hoodie of a boy's-a-gun. Like the sharing scars before dinner line, it again relates to how intimate Tyler and this guy were together, how they revealed things to each other otherwise hidden from the rest of the world. While the wording of, I know your secrets, N-word, could come off as a threat. Tyler ensures that it's not in the following lines, where he says,

I'm not bitter or nothing, I understand that everybody making a choice according to plan, and we had two different blueprints. In another example of his emotional maturation, Tyler accepts how things ultimately turned out, understanding the complex ways in which our fates are determined by more than what we attempt to will into the world individually. Our collective and individual blueprints are drafted by history and circumstance and nature,

and a myriad of other uncontrollable variables, and Tyler here shows an understanding that quite often things happen beyond our control, and that ultimately the long road of our lives is best traveled when we can eventually accept that reality rather than let it consume us with bitterness and resentment. Tyler then builds on this thematic blueprint, extending it into another drawn-out analogy. He wraps, You opened up early on, I thought I had a permit.

You started building a bridge and turned it into a fence. Then my building got torn down all because of your new tenant. It feels like another callback to Earthquake, where Tyler compares the building of their lives together as a construction site, and him fearing all that they built comes crashing down. You opened up early on works two ways, in that he opened his property to be shared by another, but also opened up as in he revealed things about himself to Tyler, again evoking the emotional intimacy of their relationship. This had Tyler thinking he had a permit, permission to start laying foundation with him.

There's a nice visual of a bridge, symbolic of connection, morphing into a offense, a symbol of division, with Tyler blaming the new tenant or the girl for the destruction of everything they built together. As we discussed a few times this season, while there might be a specific girl in this love triangle, she's also symbolic of the crushes fear of his own sexuality and the social stigma of deviating from heteronormativity. This leads to Tyler buttoning up the analogy by revealing its broader universal truth. He says, I'll just buy up some new shit, never down with Elise. You never lived in your truth. I'm just happy I lived in it. A lease implies temporary ownership or borrowing, where Tyler is more interested in real ownership,

a long-term commitment despite the responsibility of ongoing maintenance and the difficulties of aging. This kind of commitment allows him to live in his truth, and with houses being the thing we live in, this conclusive line of the metaphor is ultimately its point. True is a term used in construction to describe making something level, square, or balanced. Thus, truth is the critical, sustainable foundation of a well-founded human. Without it, who you are in the world will always be at odds with who you are inside, which over time undoubtedly manifests conflict just as a faulty foundation becomes detrimental to a house or building. The fact that the crush opened up to Tyler that they were able to live in each other's

truth and their time together is the reason why Tyler went so hard, perhaps too hard, in his pursuit of this relationship. But staying true to himself is also what allows him to reach this current place of genuine acceptance, understanding that the guy simply isn't there yet, that his blueprint is drawn up differently than his own, and ultimately, that's okay. Thus, Tyler closes out this beautiful verse, but I finally found peace, so peace. It's a conclusive moment in the Igor narrative, formerly articulating Tyler's acceptance of the situation and his choice to move on. Just like his love, he's gone.

Let me do it over. I hate wasted potential. That shit crushes your spirit. It really does. It crushes yourself. In one of my personal favorite moments of the album, Tyler seemingly asks his engineer to start the verse over so that he could try another take, to which the engineer likely asked what part. Tyler responds everything, while the tape slows down and the song melts into its end. It's a simple moment that somehow expresses everything, the regret, the humiliation, and the futile wish of starting the whole thing over again. Because everything always seems so clear in retrospect, and if only we knew what we know now, then, oh, how things would be. go differently. Of course, we understand this to be untrue. The beauty and tragedy of life is that we only get one shot, and our perception of time is that of a straight line. We can't go back and change the

past. We can only change how we feel about it and use the lessons learned to inform our future. The one-two punch of this moment is then realized as we hear Gerard Carmichael return saying, I hate wasted potential, that shit crushes your spirit, it really does, it crushes your soul. It's a potent quote parallel and sentiment to Tyler's wish to do everything over, as the relationship now feels like a wasted opportunity to build something eternal. Drod Carmichael's reappearance, Bridges Gone Gone with its counterpart a thank you. The song's refrain, which is its only part with vocals, is actually an interpolation of a 1998 song titled Fragile by Japanese singer-songwriter Tatsuro Yamashita.

As you just heard, these original lyrics differ a bit from Tyler's rendition. The original goes, Thank You for your love, thank you for the heart. They'll never be a long and lonely night again. Notably, Yamashita's appreciation here is punctuated with the promise of a happy future together. Meanwhile, Tyler sings, thank you for the love, thank you for the joy, but I don't ever want to fall in love again. When taken as a whole, it continues to capture the the similatineity of feeling experienced in the throes of a breakup. Tyler's genuinely grateful, yet the pain felt in these moments make the thought of eventually giving love another chance

seem impossible and not worth the risk of another heartbreak. It's a feeling we might compare to the thought of alcohol during a bad hangover, where you promise yourself never again, despite the fun you may have had the night before. On the immediate repetition of the refrain, Tyler alters the lyrics singing, Thank you for the time, thank you for your mind, but I don't ever want to fall in love again. It's appropriate that one of Tyler's lyrical alterations would express gratitude toward the time they gave each other. As we've tracked all season, time has been a motif throughout the album, with Tyler expressing time to be his most valuable and coveted possession.

Our time here is finite, increasingly so as we age. And choosing to share our limited time with a single person is perhaps more of a gift than we can truly comprehend. Now something I want to point out musically and thank you is its instrumentation. Throughout this season, we've talked about how cohesive Igor sounds, despite a wide variety of song styles, from the pop leanings of earthquake to the sentimental ballad of running out of time, to the hyper-cautic onslaught of New Magic Wan, to the hip-hop stylings of a boy as a gun. One big reason for this cohesion is Tyler's seemingly concerted decisions and instrumentation, that throughout all these contrasting song types, he's used similar instruments,

even when those choices are somewhat counterintuitive. For example, the album begins with 30 seconds of a distorted synthesizer. We then tracked how this distorted synth sound became a central part of Igor's landscape, heard in some fashion in every song. While the distorted synth feels at home in an aggressive song like What's Good, the sound doesn't make as much sense in a slower, intimate ballad like running out of time. It's precisely because of these kind of counterintuitive choices that Igor has such a distinct and unified sound. Every song is speaking the same musical language. I point this out because the instrumentation of Thank You incorporates many of these Igor-defining sounds at the same time.

There's of course the distorted bass we just talked about. We also hear an arpaciated synthesizer outlining the core progression in a rapid flurry of robotic ascending and descending notes. Recall similar arpaciated synths were heard on Igor's theme, on the refrain of earthquake, and on running out of time. On Thank You, we also hear the gentle Rhodes keyboard playing the chord progression. A Rhodes keyboard has also been featured throughout Igor, like on the bridge of I Think. The Rhodes is also the main harmonic instrument throughout running out of time. We also just heard the Rhodes and the outro for Gone Gods. We also just bobbed some new shit, never down with a lease.

You never lived in your truth. I'm just happy I lived in it, but I finally found peace. We even hear it used counterintuitively in New Magic Wand, where it takes the place of the distorted synth in the verse. Now given selfish I hate sharing This 6040 Working Now given that Gone Gone

Thank You is the beginning of Tyler reflecting on his experience of this relationship that's documented by this album It seems incredibly fitting that Thank You is a concentrated musical reflection of what we've experienced musically on the album This reflected feeling is amplified by two other sound samples we hear throughout Thank You.

First we notice that a voice saying the word Dow is heard repeatedly Recall we heard this same Dow sample all the way back on Igor's theme. We also hear the sample fragment, Got My Eyes Open and Thank You. Of course, this was also heard in Igor's theme. It then made a reappearance at the tail end of What's Good. With these familiar samples included in such a familiar musical landscape, the feeling of thank you for me is one of reflection,

as we too begin to reflect on all that we've experienced in this musical journey that is Igor. Traditional narrative structure, like the hero's journey, is often very, visualize as a circle. The protagonist begins their story at the top of the circle and descends down through the stages of the narrative plotted around the circle. The bottom or the low point of the circle represents the emotional low point in the story, the protagonist's rock bottom moment. It's from that low point that they build themselves back up, climbing up toward the top of the circle where they began. Thus they eventually return home to the top and the contrast between who they were at the start of their journey and who they are upon returning is emblematic of how their experience changed

them, how they've matured and grown as a result of the story. The familiar musical landscape of thank you and its samples calling back to the beginning of the album gives us this feeling of returning to its start, of ascending up the circle, of heading back to where we began. It's a perfect musical reflection of Tyler's psychological reflection as he parses through his memories of their time together and prepares himself for a new beginning, hoping to return to a place where he's ready to love Conclusions Compaire with scars before dinner Jump off the roof and turn the mirror

felt like summer Gone Gone Thank You represents a pivotal moment in Igor's narrative as Tyler for the first time is looking in the rearview mirror reflecting on what was rather than chasing what could be It's in this reflective past tense process that we witnessed Tyler working through the emotional clutter of competing simultaneous feelings in order to both let go

and be okay with it. the two things Gerard Carmichael preface the song with. Letting go implies giving up the fight and moving on from the hope of things working out, while being okay with it implies a holistic acceptance of the experience for what it was, relinquishing yourself of any residual bitterness or resentment. It's a process that proves to be extremely difficult, a process that clearly reveals the two-sided scale of emotional investment, the unavoidable reality that the more of ourselves we put into something,

the more that we will feel, both good and bad. This is of course the inherent high risk, high reward of meaningful, intensely chromatic connection with another. Indeed, each connection we make has the potential to develop an infinite number of ways, and among the thousands of connections we make across our lifetime, it's extremely rare to find one that you believe is eternal, that has the potential to build your forever on. And when the universe gives you that rare connection, when you believe wholeheartedly in its potential, and that potential isn't realized, when it one day just evaporates into the future, you the ether. Well, there's really nothing more devastating. As Drod put it, wasted potential

crushes your spirit, as you stand alone at the crossroads of your life with and without someone, mourning not only the end of your time together, but also the time that never was, mourning the dream of a future that will never be. This is the composite of memories, dreams, nostalgia, loss, remorse, and bittersweet gratitude that Gone Gone Thank You so beautifully captures, as Tyler traverses this emotional terrain with honesty and grace, coming out the other side having finally obtained what we all hope to find after having our heartbroken. Peace.

This episode of Dysect was written by Camden Ostrander and me. If you enjoyed today's episode, please tell a friend about the show or share on social media and tag at Dysect Podcast. It really helps. Limited season 10 merchandise can be purchased at Dysectpodcast.com. Audio editing by Kevin Pooler, song recreations by Andrew Atwood,

Theme music by Bureaucratic. All right, thanks, everyone. Talk to you next week.