Circles is overcast with a chance of sunshine, both the storm and the ray of light that eventually cracks through the gray sky.
#Haste for mac mac
In sharing these parts of himself, Mac Miller arrives at his purest, most compelling artistic statement, a stab at the caliber of songwriting achieved by titans of the form. Do people like me? Is my best good enough? Have I discovered my life’s purpose? Is true love on my horizon? Confident people doubt themselves just as hard as anyone else their fear is just as true as their bluster. “If life is but a dream, then so are we,” Miller muses on “I Can See.” “Why I gotta build something beautiful just to go set it on fire?”Ĭircles gives voice to the nagging notes of inadequacy that linger in the margins of our greatest triumphs, movies of uncertainty that play against the backs of our eyelids when we turn out the lights at the end of the night. The production, helmed by Swimming collaborator Jon Brion, is lush but also light in its touch, as are the vocals, which unpack tough ideas in low, raw tones. Circles is, by turns, quiet and cozy but also stripped and unnerving. Mac sings over the hip-hop drums of “Complicated” and raps on top of the stately jazz guitar on “Hand Me Downs.” The blend is seamless and unpredictably shiftless. “Woods” pairs drum programming evocative of ’80s R&B with gauzy keys, a plaintive vocal, a curt rap, and guitar played by Wendy Melvoin, of Prince’s Revolution and the offshoot, Wendy & Lisa. Rap is a brush in its toolkit so are funk, folk, and psychedelic rock. It’s not a rap album in the traditional sense. The new album picks up where Swimming left off, spiritually and creatively, further consolidating the composite elements of Mac Miller’s creativity into a unified whole. Today, with the release of Swimming’s twin and photographic negative, Circles, we get new insight into where Mac Miller was headed. It would be a while before the question of what that was leading to would be answered. By the summer of 2018, before Swimming’s release, he was exploring new concepts already, studying icons of the past and buzzing with melodies from his favorite classic rock songs. True to form, he was already evolving again by the time we heard that one. It supposed that he could be both devastating and sweet at the same time, that the hardest kind of writing is the honest kind. Swimming bridged the contemplative, melodic side of his music explored in songs like “Rush Hour” and “REMember” with the flair and confidence of “Break the Law” and “Here We Go” and guest features alongside the likes of Earl, Schoolboy Q, and Vince Staples. When we spoke on the release date for 2016’s The Divine Feminine and I asked a question I’d posed to him during the sessions - namely, whether he was worried about alienating fans who came to his music specifically for lyrical gymnastics with a collection of love songs where he sang as much as rapped - he told me quite succinctly that, “People need to expand their minds, me included. He grew a following and then set about leading the flock out to higher ground. It’s present in the music Mac made outside those albums, in songs made public and ones that have yet to see the light of day. You can see this push and pull in the impressive range of Watching Movies With the Sound Off, Faces, and GO:OD AM, and later in the wild swings taken with The Divine Feminine and Swimming. He managed by giving the audience a little of what he knew they wanted followed by a little of what they might not know he wanted. “He wanted people to know the layers and the depth of his potential.” Mac’s career was a delicate dance he worked hard to get loose from expectations and step into his true potential.
Earl Sweatshirt compared his friend to a pirate ship on the go: “He was moving real fast.” Flying Lotus recalled frequent updates regarding new music when the two lived in the same neighborhood in California: “Mac was the best because he was that dude who would always come over with a new batch, every season … He made me feel lazy, and I’m working.” “He wanted people to know that there was way more to him than his indie-rap success,” Pharrell told me last month. Over the last year or so, through chance or subconscious ambition or some cosmic provenance, I’ve gotten to speak with a number of people who knew and worked with Mac Miller in his lifetime. With the release of Swimming’s twin and photographic negative, Circles, we get new insight into where Mac Miller was headed.
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