Ticonderoga is an album that touches upon the relationship between a person and their life, whether it be their daily habits, their truths, or their community. As participants in a shared existence, there are pieces of sentiment that every listener with a functioning conscience can hold tightly and feel the bittersweet melancholy of love and loss. Labeled as ‘dad rock’, Secret Audio brings a perspective of an experienced life through many of life’s conflicts, the type that isn’t understood until it is lived. These lessons aren’t quite linear, as the album weaves these themes throughout the nine (and one prelude) songs, and it’s important to remember that we never quite outgrow these feelings, nor can we ever be free from these worldly issues, and we will need to learn to live with these woes.
In atypical fashion, I wanted to touch upon the last track of the album first, as it is the title track. Ticonderoga is derived from the Iroquois word terontaro:ken, translating to “it is at the junction of two waterways” (Wikipedia), and the first line depicts two rivers parallel to two different lives. This theme hides in many of the songs with a narrator questioning many life choices and places of belonging, as the world around falls apart in the destructive practices of mankind, especially heartbreaking as it is all on top of stolen land.
Destruction as a method of depleting life’s natural resources and the hoarding of nourishment are rampant in our world today. Songs like “Holy Land” and “Summer Snow” highlight these themes with somber lyrics laced with desperate and futile attempts of reconciliation, hoping that atonement could be achieved from souvenir shops to overlook and look away from the stolen treasure and buried bones, or through the inevitable acceptance that living a substantial life meant polluting the world with unnatural chemicals. The latter is especially sad as the lyrics feel like a struggle shared with another individual whose values misalign with the narrator; how can humankind march towards progression as a collection of syncopated values when individually we can’t even align? Meanwhile, “Holy Land” begins with an innocuous outlook despite the pollution accompanied by a growing presence of instruments in piano and bass, slowly bringing in guitars, drums, and backing vocals to deliver the harsher questions of life, with answers varying by a person’s life experiences.
It is easy to pin all of life’s problems to capitalism, but doing so also requires understanding how much dependency the individual has on a system that has been bolstered by years of oppression, with the power of wealth growing exponentially with time. As individuals, we have limited time to experience and build what we can, and American life is structured so rigidly that people are cattle prodded into a lifetime of working as a means for living. In our youth, we may have dreams and ideas of changing the world and embracing positivity with the sharing of inclusive values, but values always end up being ranked one over the other through all our choices for survival. “Fall Apart” portrays the fading of that youthful vigor, how it gets crushed under that need to survive, and how the banner that you hold will fade into something that people will observe as nothing but art.
Disconnection from a community begins when there’s a shift in values; people trying to survive will place certain values over others, whether it is out of necessity or ignorance, and when these differences in values become too incompatible, the community falls apart. And how could that have been prevented in a system built to pit people against each other? We can see this disconnect when we see our childhood hometowns transform, reflecting the realignment of resources (as scarce or bountiful as they may be) to fit the needs of those with the resources to pay. “Not From There” describes such a change, hitting the listener with a “mother’s house” as a prime example of a building that holds a tender spot, and how that loss itself would devastate anyone experiencing the loss of a childhood home. And if that isn’t a personal enough loss through disconnection, “Via Telephone” brings the disconnection on an individual level by spelling out a deterioration of a connection with the people we converse with. The complaint of technology being a deterrent to connection has been dragged against the concrete over and over again, but when social media marketing techniques are so prevalent in daily life, people are conditioned to move from one distraction to another in short bursts of time.
I thoroughly enjoyed some of the contrast in the album, particularly the track sequencing from “Holy Land” to “Clean Living” as the latter track has a jaunty piano introduction and describes a seemingly healthy life to a steady beat accompanied by baritone sax, strings, and questions about human connections. Also worth mentioning, “CDG” delivers a melancholy story of abandonment through tempo changes and intricate instrument arrangement, including two trumpet solos alternating with the final chorus deliveries.
Returning to “Ticonderoga” (the song) again after absorbing the themes of destruction and disconnect that we’ve been forced to experience (by life itself, not the album), we revisit the facts that the ice caps are melting, the bombs are falling, and that we are dependent on machines to be connected. The depiction of banners lifting and one-way flights feels like forced behavior, with an even more devastating depiction of tidal waves filling a shallow grave and a question about brevity, all questioning the authenticity and validity of a lifestyle.
“Ticonderoga” delivers many of the issues of disconnect in somewhat of a root-cause analysis through descriptions of life via stories, city sceneries, and emotions. After taking time to absorb the album and its themes, I am more aware of the role I have in my own life and the world I want to live in, and it is vital to remember that despite the way the world operates and the natural decay of connection, we can still put genuine effort to maintain strong bridges with our loved ones, and that community is still very important for survival. Our lives flow like rivers, and upon our connections, we can pave beautiful and lasting impressions on the world.
Written by Christian Ang
