How Logan Ledger keeps me in a Golden State of mind

Every so often, when you’re exceptionally lucky, you hear an album that you know will be with you for life. In this case, Logan Ledger’s Golden State was brought into my life by the right person at the right time, and in the months since it has been on my mind often. Anytime I’m drawn back into playing this album, I’m taken back to earlier in the year when I was doing things entirely and truly for myself, a concept that doesn’t come all that naturally to me. From February to May I was in Vermont, living and studying in an incomprehensibly beautiful place, somewhere that will now always feel a little bit like home. After that, I spent a few weeks travelling and visiting places that had previously felt way too far away and way too big. But as I know realise, when your mindset changes your world can change too.

              This album is sonically and lyrically phenomenal, there’s such a strong presence of the Californian music of the past and is obviously the genius work of someone who has that music running through their bloodstream. Hopefully when my mind is in a different mode, I’ll be writing something a little more conventional with some more intellectual comments, for now I just have some personal thoughts.

I can distinctly remember the first time I listened to Golden State after being introduced to it by someone who was new in my life then but I still, and probably always will, connect them with this album. I had that immediate realisation that this was an album that would be sticking around with me, a feeling pretty rare when you’re as deeply buried in music as I often am.

I remember being in Virginia, looking through the floor to ceiling windows in the bedroom I was staying in. The deep green of that humid summer’s leaves pairing with this album and making me feel entirely content in the house of a distant family member who I’d never met before but was willing to host me.

I remember listening to ‘There Goes My Mind’ when I was walking around Nashville, as solo travel was making me feel a little uneasy but significantly more excited at the prospect of being somewhere that was home to the music that means the world to me. That’s a time I long for again.

I remember walking through Central Park on the day I was going back to the UK, the harmonies on ‘Some Misty Morning’ in my ears, and asking myself how being alone in a place so opposite to my life at home could feel so normal and so natural. This was the end of the best few months of my life, but Logan was reminding me that it was ‘the end that we’ll learn is only the beginning’.

I remember listening to ‘Till It Feels Right’ on my flight back to London in a state of grief, gratitude and optimistic yearning: ‘And it's hard knowin' whether to laugh or to cry. Thеre's always something else around the bend’. That bend might not be ending anytime soon, but I like not knowing what’s round the corner, I’ve never been someone with a plan.

The album closes with a track titled ‘Where Will I Go’ – a contemplation of what comes next, what happens when your mind moves at a different speed to time, and what it is that makes those questions easier to answer. For a closing track, this is as perfect as you can get. There’s a certain type of self-doubt that comes with a change of mindset, over the last few months I feel that I’ve realised what it is I want, and the idea that when I’m doing it for myself, that is possible. ‘I guess I’ll get there, I guess I’m moving on, maybe I’ll wind up where I belong.’  

I want my next move to be to the other side of the world, to a place that feels more like home than anywhere I have here and like somewhere that will let me do what I love. For me, that move realistically will be quite big and there is an aspect of guilt that comes with leaving people and places behind but that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong thing to do. For anyone that’s struggled to believe in yourself, and might have felt that lack of belief coming from other people too, ‘keep holding on til it feels right’. Because at some point it will, whether or not people around you understand, you’ll reach somewhere that feels like a Golden State of mind.

             I suppose music might not mean as much to other people as it does to me, and if you’re one of those people and you’ve read this, I desperately hope you have something else that keeps the days rolling like music does for me. Logan Ledger’s Golden State is an exceptional album, it’s an immediate personal classic and I know that wherever I am, and when I’m asking myself ‘Where Will I Go’, this album is there to keep me company. Californian wine probably will be too.