It has been nearly eight years since my three Welsh children have visited my family in the United States. Even though I would have loved to make the eight-hour plane trip with them more often, logistics, the pandemic, and cost have kept us away.
10.06.2024 - 16:59 / cntraveler.com
Unlike every other Swiftie in the universe, I had been dreading April 19 for months. That was when Taylor Swift would release her newest album The Tortured Poets Department—and I was going to be on remote safari in Botswana. Would a satellite link in the middle of the African bush be enough to download the album?
“You could just listen when you get home next week,” deadpanned a colleague who clearly didn't get it. “Who cares about another Taylor Swift breakup album? You’re in the middle of bush!”
When the morning of the album’s release rolled around, the Wi-Fi at the new Natural Selection camp, Tawana, proved to be lightning fast. And so, at dawn in Botswana on April 19th, as we trundled out of camp for our morning game drive, The Tortured Poets Department rang through my headphones. What I didn’t expect was how much it would change the safari itself.
As Swift swooned on the country-tinged “But Daddy I Love Him,” I felt my eyes rest more easily on my surroundings as my brain parsed through new lyrics. I saw details I hadn’t noticed before: not merely identifying birds, but seeing how their feathers fluttered in the wind; not just seeing a leopard stalk through tall grass, but watching her tail flick in rhythm with each step. Eye contact with a cheetah guarding his freshly killed antelope during “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me” sent shivers down my spine. The sweeping chorus of “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” became all the more anthemic and cinematic in a safari vehicle driving at speed across the open plain. The entire experience grew in richness, complexity, and detail—I was struck by how deeply the music shaped my experience.
I’ve done numerous safaris across Southern Africa; but this was the first time I listened to music while on a game drive. Yes, music serves a sort of memory-marking function from our past—so often, a song can instantly take us back to a set time and place. But it shapes our present, too.
Consider the Los Angeles restaurant Verse, which calls itself an “acoustically perfect” dining experience. It’s the creation of 18-time Grammy award-winning mixing engineer Manny Marroquin, who built the dining room so that everything from the live music to the ambient conversation of neighboring tables complements your meal. Marroquin works with chefs to create tasting menus inspired by different musical artists and genres. (For whatever it’s worth, he also worked on Swift’s album Red.)
“The beauty of music is that our journey has almost nothing to do with the artist themself… it’s about how music gets you to a certain state of mind,” Marroquin says. At Verse, he uses acoustics to complement the food in order to create sensory experiences that go above and beyond. He recently put
It has been nearly eight years since my three Welsh children have visited my family in the United States. Even though I would have loved to make the eight-hour plane trip with them more often, logistics, the pandemic, and cost have kept us away.
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