An Open Letter to Spillage Village’s “Hapi”

“Hapi” is the 11th track on Spillage Village’s critically acclaimed 2020 release, Spilligion. 

The nighttime clouds blanketed the town below and swallowed orange hues of streetlights. It’s Halloween weekend, and as if the weather knew the occasion, these tangerine clouds dimly lit the surrounding sky the way Jack O Lanterns light doorways on October nights; warm, soft, generously smoothing the crevices and edges of all that catch its flicker. 

Our campsite at the western edge of the mountain caught what was left of the ocean’s breeze. It was careful, gentle, even when it wrapped around us, not unlike the way seafoam rolls over toes after a wave’s break. In the company of two friends, this clearing near the top of the mountain, with the orange-tinged view and the seafoam breeze, would be the venue where we met for the first time.

Huddled around the campfire, we made our way through our ever-expanding song queue. My friend curated an impressive mix of classical infused hip-hop, sampled tracks, and genre-less alternative. But when you crescendoed, strummed, shrilled, rapped, faded, hymned, soared, bellowed, and sang… for 6 minutes and 23 seconds I was free.

The minute our vacation had finished I had you downloaded on Spotify. Oh, how we’d go on together to see through everything from the most mundane to the most extraordinary! You made vacuuming my dorm room exciting and brought a pep to my step as I walked through campus. You preceded tests and harmonized with sunsets, erased the silence of a roommate-less dorm, and powered hundreds of miles of running. But you were always more than just a song of enjoyment.

Like Frank Ocean’s “Solo” and The Faces’ “Ooh La La” before you, you transcended into more than a song for me. You were a touchstone of time and place, a marker of this transition into the contradictions of college life. How could I be so fraught with self-doubt yet sanguine about the possibilities? You helped remedy a contradiction into movement, movement into meaningfulness. I’ll die before I lose my thanks for you.

That’s why I’m writing you this letter. I need you to know of my thankfulness. and I want to encourage others who feel they owe a debt of gratitude to a song to say their thanks too. 

I’m increasingly doubtful about love at first sight, but you gave credence to love at first sound. You introduced yourself to me with the grandest of introductions; ringing bells gave way to a piano played with so much fervor I could almost feel my own fingers pressing down on the keys. And oh my, that chorus! You told me of the man in the woods playing his off key piano (a piano that you bet he wouldn’t tune if he could), and the gunshots you pray don’t off you… oh how you wish you could change it if you could.  

In your post-chorus, you questioned me for answers I couldn’t give (“Oh, why? Oh, why? Oh, why? Oh, why?”), at times you asked as if you were on the verge of tears. What you didn’t know then was that I too asked myself “Oh, why?” every single day as I related to your search for answers.

But it was in your verses that your ambivalence turned into a conviction so palpable that it resonates with me to this day. Whether it was towards the possibly harmonious coexistence of freedom and wealth (“So, you get rich, I’ma try to get free, not exclusive mutually, oh I gotta find the balance between”) or the utopian project of dreaming a better world (“I dream of a world where love is the rule, where hearts walk two by two, and I with you. I dream of a place where a child’s wish can always come true and the old and withered become renewed”), your persistence immediately struck a chord somewhere deep within me.

Perhaps that’s what I was lacking at the clearing near the top of the mountain, with the orange tinged view and the seafoam breeze: conviction. Indeed, the preceding months were filled with hesitancy, doubt, and regret. Yet, they were punctuated with an ever-growing realization of the possibilities that Berkeley, newfound friendships, and time alone presented. So when in your third verse you sang of looking forward in spite of the struggle, “All I had to sacrifice, blood, sweat, and tears pay the price, start to think for better day’s tomorrow, keep my spirits high up,” I realized what was missing. I was succumbing to the hesitancy and doubt; I needed a deep-rooted conviction in the better days of tomorrow. But this does not simply arise out of nowhere, right?

My question was answered in your outro, where you had one last piece of advice for me. As if you could read me like a book, you spoke of a belief towards dominion over one’s own freedom, “Your freedom is beyond anyone outside of your self’s controlling. It can’t be bought or sold, given away or even stolen. It’s a divine entitlement, vital to the nourishment of the soul.” If I were to exercise conviction in my life, it had to be towards my dominion over my own freedom. 

You’re not alone in this sentiment. Many of the great works of art that have resonated with me throughout my life do so because they thematically hint at freedom, for all that it’s worth. Caspar David’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is Romanticism’s most representative work of emotion and individualism. Like the wanderer, I too seek out vistas and cliffsides, contemplating the self of it all. The novels of Toni Morrison, in particular Song of Solomon, in which the protagonist finds freedom in flight only after he immerses himself in his family’s past, are relatable and familiar to the internal struggles I go through. But you presented yourself in a form that I could carry with me wherever I went, in a medium that is perhaps my favorite to submit to: song.

And so I did. I submitted to your lyrics and drew from it the desire to take ownership over different aspects of my life; to find freedom in the progress within constrained and specific activities. I’d always wanted to get better at guitar, so I submitted myself to the beautiful complexities of its neck, notes, and structure. I practiced until I got better, and although I’ve still got a ways to go, I’m freer than I was before. I ran and trained with a focus and intensity truly unfamiliar to me, until I laced my shoes that had your lyrics written on their side and ran a marathon, an experience I’m forever grateful for doing. These are just two of many ways in which you’ve transformed me.

So best believe me when I say that the movement I described earlier is, in large part, thanks to you. The movement, and subsequent meaningfulness that arose, was made possible only after you helped me amass the convictions that untangled the contradictions that had for so long burdened me. I know that the self is only one aspect of freedom, along the way I’ve relied on and continued to rely on others. This is not simply an individual adventure.

But you were, and still are, mine. My song of freedom; overcoming, and more than a letter can hope to communicate. I’ll never forget that night at the clearing near the top of the mountain, with the orange-tinged view and the seafoam breeze, where the bells rang and piano keys sang to me for the first time. 

I’m forever thankful for you, “Hapi.” 

Article by Joe Sison

Design by Elise Rodriquez