Weathervanes (Album) by Freelance Whales

One of my favorite albums ever. After I started being more intentional about discovering new music, this was one of the first albums that clicked with me as a whole. I like basically every song on the album. The songs are emotional, gentle, "vibey". Combination of lovely lyrics and chill musicality.

Listening to it now, it gives me a nostalgia for the time period when I first started listening to it - in 2022 (so I have strongest associations of it with the feeling of junior year of college and the summer I spent in NYC after it). I think I can remember the exact moment when I listened to the album for the first time -- I was in the room of my university apartment, either working on a jigsaw puzzle that was on my floor^[1] or folding laundry.

If I recall correctly, the way I found the album was actually through an Instagram reel (unless it was Tiktok? But I don't remember using Tiktok back then) that had a clip from the first song, and it captured my interest so I looked up the album and listened to it.

Top songs:

• Generator First Floor
• Location
• Broken Horse
• Ghosting
• Generator Second Floor
• The Great Estates

Honorable mention to (all of the others):

• Hannah
• Starring
• Kilojoules
• We Could be Friends

There's a couple other tracks which are purely instrument so I'm not listing them, but they are vibe-y too.

The band does have another album called Diluvia but I've only listened to it a couple times and I didn't like it as much. Unfortunately, the band has not made new music since 2014. Sadly one of the band's members, Chuck Criss (brother of Darren Criss), died in 2022.

I have another nice memory with this album. I had a listening session of this album (not the full album but many of my top songs) with a close friend during senior year of college. We sat in my room, dark except the glow of my LED strip set to green (even though the album cover is more brownish, I associated the album with a deep green for some reason), and listened, discussing a little but mostly absorbing the music. I haven't really done a dedicated session like this with any other albums.

Potential For 3D

The album also evokes an idea I have related to Personal 3D VR World Building -- I would like to someday work on creating 3D environments relating to memories, scenes, media, that are meaningful to me. The Weathervanes cover and many of the songs (lyrically) evoke spatial relations (the album is partially meant to represent moving through different areas of a house), not to mention vivid imagery and scenery. This, in addition to it being one of my favorite albums makes it a prime subject for the 3D scene building. The songs would be playing in the background, of course, as the visitor explored the environment.

More specific ideas for this:

• Approaching the house from the hills shown in the album cover (ideally the initial vantage point in the scene would look extremely close to the album cover). There's no house in the album cover (and I don't think the bird house (is that what that is?) is meant to be the actual house that the songs talk about) so I imagine you must crest the hills to see it.
• Interactive "crank" for the Generator
• Elevator-like experience for visiting different floors of the house and seeing the imagery described in Location
• Graveyard/backyard with glowy spirit orbs for The Great Estates