When you call my name

 I'm somewhere in here.

South Korean boy band GOT7 performed the final leg of their Keep Spinning World Tour to a sold-out crowd of thousands at the Mall of Asia Arena.

This is a version of an article previously published in the Supreme section of The Philippine Star.

If you’re a particularly passionate consumer of music and you live in the Philippines, “Come to Manila!” is more than just a plea to the artists you love; it’s more like a battle cry. And for a good while, fans of K-Pop superstars GOT7 have been waiting for them to make good on their promise to return to the country.

After a couple of previous fanmeets and a three-year absence, GOT7 finally made their way back to Manila for their first full concert at the Mall of Asia Arena on Oct. 26 — made even more special by the fact that it’s the culmination of their Keep Spinning World Tour, taking place just one week before they’re set to release their new EP “Call My Name” with the single You Calling My Name.

The energy in the city hit a peak as soon as the seven members — JB, Mark, Jackson, Jinyoung, Youngjae, Bambam, and Yugyeom — arrived, with Jackson causing quite a stir when he was spotted buying a shaving razor at a local department store the night before the sold-out show.

The concert kicked off not long after the sun had set, opening with a VCR that had attendees swooning before GOT7 took the stage and performed their most recent single, the sultry and buoyant Eclipse, followed by Out and Never Ever.

A performance of Skyway then led to the solo and unit stages, beginning with resident songwriters and producers JB and Youngjae crooning Ride and Gravity respectively. The rap line a.k.a. the AmeriThaiKong unit, comprising LA-born Mark, Bangkok-bred Bambam, and Hong Kong native Jackson, then performed God Has Returned and Mañana. Finally, there was a battle of moves between main dancer Yugyeom, and Jinyoung who retorted, “I’m a dancer, too!”

They kept the flow of energy going with some choice B-sides including a remix of Stop Stop It produced by Bambam, 1°, I Am Me, Come On, Page and more, plus their irrefutably iconic single Just Right. They got a little somber and dreamy with Thank You before ramping things up again with Teenager.

“It’s been a while,” Jackson said between songs. “GOT7 is back!” Bambam asked fans to scream “hell yeah” back at him, and was pleased to find that the audience held a good amount of male voices shouting along.

When people began chanting “Walang uuwi!” and they had the words translated, they didn’t hesitate to keep repeating it as well. “Our next song is Walang Uuwi,” JB quipped in a perfect show of his signature deadpan, and Jackson didn’t even wait a beat before mimicking a bass drop, singing the two words, and breaking into a funny little dance.

More songs came next, including a trio of retroactively recognizable title tracks: Lullaby, Hard Carry, and Miracle.

Close to the encore, it was GOT7’s turn to be moved and dumbfounded when a surprise event planned by fans was put into motion, with a video message and singalong relaying the fans’ love and support for them in the three-year wait for their return. Mark, infamous for his low threshold of tears, was visibly touched as he took a moment just crying onstage while being comforted by his members.

In the speeches that followed, each member apologized for the long wait, gave a heartfelt thank-you to everyone in the crowd, and promised that they’ll be back more often. Jackson marveled at the show of passion, while Bambam assured the crowd that there would no longer be any need to fly out to other countries just to see them, that they’ll make sure to fly right to Manila instead.

Youngjae in particular made everybody laugh when he said that the sentiments reminded him of his adorable dog Coco, whom he co-parents with Mark, and how she would always wait for him to come back and it makes him sad he can’t see her more often.

They ultimately closed the show with some classics and guaranteed grooves: Fly, Girls Girls Girls, Shopping Mall, and Before the Full Moon Rises.

The stages were dynamic, with screens and setups that made it seem like you were stepping into another world. Their dancing was fluid and alive, their voices carrying across louder than ever. It was three hours spent exchanging so much energy and fervor and love — literally, in the latter’s case, if the heartfelt and prolonged back-and-forth of “Saranghae!” between the fans and the members was anything to go by.

Even as the other six had left the stage, Youngjae stayed behind, drinking it all in and seemingly not wanting the night to end just yet. Still, he had to come down eventually, and so did everybody else. The cheering rang clear and the lightsticks remained lit for just a few minutes longer. And as they took their final bows and waves their final goodbyes — until the next concert, that is — the only thing left to do was just to keep spinning.

Please get me home, though I don’t know where it is

Transcribed from a journal entry dated 07/11/2017.

Lately I’ve been crying for no reason. It’s fine.

It usually happens when I listen to Johnny Gallagher’s music—not from his album, but from the bootlegs people have been posting to Mediafire as though they were full-length live albums. I downloaded them all in one go one night and listened to them as I fell asleep. They faded into one another, and into my subconscious. It was like that night years and years ago when I became a goner for the Strokes and—I remember this so vividly—drifted in and out of consciousness with Julian Casablancas insisting, “You’re no fun, you’re no fun, you’re no fun, you’re no fun,” in my ears.

The recordings came complete with the little spiels Johnny would give between songs, so it felt to me like I was listening to him do stand-up, too. He can be pretty funny, and it could be comforting, too, to listen to him just talking.

But the songs themselves, they take me someplace else. Not just because they’re live and raw so you feel like you’re in the room with that crowd. They’re just so heartfelt, and unfiltered, and real. I hadn’t really been listening to bootlegs for a long time, not since I was 12 and I had no other way to hear the Jonas Brothers’ yet-unreleased songs, particularly their cover of “Take On Me.” (I’m still waiting on a studio version.)

The Johnny recordings brought me back to that time of pure adoration and compromise: I would listen to imperfect, low-quality audio for you, because I love your music that much.

It’s interesting to me, getting to hear several different versions of certain songs at a time. I like being able to point out lyric changes, or shifts and hitches in his voice, or faster and slower takes. I especially like it when he makes a mistake and soldiers on, or when he has to start over. I’ve come to know the individual versions so well that I can pick out favorites—but parts of each of them are so endearing that I keep listening to them all anyway.

In his songs, Johnny’s a mess. He’s fucked up, and lost, vulnerable, self-deprecating. Lonely, heartbroken, and in love. He’s hard on himself. He’s defined by his mistakes. He’s in awe of the world around him. He’s sad and he’s going through something; he’s having the time of his life. He wants to be, he used to be, he is.

It’s the kind of confessional, open introspection that I’m always striving for in my own writing. Johnny has no problem admitting that he’s not always happy or that he has trouble holding his liquor most nights. And his melodies are deceptively simple, but emotionally complex and so beautiful. He’s mentioned that music is an extension of his identity, that he’d lose his head without it—and you can hear that feeling in him, even if it’s just him onstage with the guitar he’s had forever with the faded lightning bolt on the strap. He just has this way of putting words and lines together; you feel like you’re reading his journal and the writing is bleeding through the pages.

And obviously, I identify a lot with what he’s singing about, and it’s been helping me process some feelings and insecurities I can’t name. When I was first listening to Six Day Hurricane, I read some interviews where he talked about “Sarasota Someone”—how he’d written it during a time of inner turmoil and it became this escapist anthem disguised as a sunny pop song. “The irony [was],” he’d said, during one of his in-between talks, “I wrote this song in the summer, but it was winter, um, inside. So I was longing for a warmer place in my soul.”

I loved that. It was reassuring, the idea that he too has had that feeling of nobody loving him or caring about him, at least it seemed like. “No, don’t tell me who does,” he sings on “Why Oh Why Am I This Way?” which he’d written based off a note a friend had left in his apartment after staying overnight that simply said: Why, oh why, am I this way, why? It’s a song, he explained, about talking to himself in the mirror and questioning everything he does wrong—which can feel like all of them some days. And I think it’s the perfect companion song to “Imagine If,” where he’s tracking how much he’s changed, not knowing exactly when he did, and how much can still happen. That kind of ability to look inside yourself and be so honest about it is just something I can’t quite wrap my head around.

My favorite kind of writing makes use of concrete, ordinary details. The sublime, I learned in critical theory class, but it’s been so long and I’m probably bastardizing Longinus’ ideas. Point is, Johnny can deliver a one-sentence summary regarding certain moments in his life that led to his songs, and you can map them out and feel them unfurl in the music, and especially the lyrics.

“Those Wild Woods,” for example, takes memories from when he went with his family to Wildwood, New Jersey when he was 13 and lost his teddy bear Arthur, and combines them with reflections on a trip he made there himself when he got older. Cue vivid imagery of boardwalks, saltwater, and things burning down.

I don’t know. I guess I’m just so used to songs being esoteric, months spent stylistically analyzing Julian Casablancas’ lyrics for my (doomed) thesis, and all. Which must be why Johnny’s are so refreshing to me. I like knowing that “So Many Things,” which reminded me early on of The Academy Is...’ “After the Last Midtown Show,” is about unrequited love at a punk rock concert held inside a Unitarian church in 2002. Or that “Red Hook Romeo,” a.k.a. “Blood Orange Red Hook Baby,” is about a NyQuil-induced fever dream he’d had when he was down with a cold that wouldn’t go away. That “Came and Went” deals with being in your late 20s and not knowing what the hell is going on, or that “Jane’s House” is a love letter to an apartment he was moving out of and leaving behind. (“I’m a sentimental person.”) That “Constance” is a song he calls his most confessional, full of longing pretending to be contempt, about a time during which he made “no earthly sense.” That “Suburban Girl” came to fruition because he’d had a rough night he was wishing he could take back when he chanced upon the Facebook status of a family friend—a teenaged girl who was lying on the floor, playing with her cat—and, oh, how he wished things were still that simple.

I could go on forever, and, god, I probably have. My point (I can almost swear I have one, besides what has become an embarrassing show of devotion for one John Gallagher, Jr.) is: These songs have been moving me to tears when I pause and really listen to them, because, well, the obvious answer is I’ve been empty and lonely and sad and in need of an outlet, and I can’t write since everything feels pointless, so I’ve been letting what I feel (and can’t feel) out through them. Does that even mean anything? It’s like I’m living through John, who was able to process his hang-ups, and even though I’m consuming rather than creating, I’m able to understand myself a little and turn all this negative energy into something that feels like...something.

But I also cry because of secondhand sentiments of finality, aching, wistfulness, self-loathing. (Firsthand, too.) I cry because of his wisdom and because it amazes me how he can write so well. (I WILL NEVER BE OVER THIS.) I cry because these songs may be a little old, but they’re new to me—they’re so new. I cry because I want to express myself like that, I do, but I don’t quite remember how.

I cry because the songs make me believe in romance when I’ve lost faith in so much else. I cry because we seem to be equally lonely, but a little less so precisely because of the music.

I cry because he gets it, and I get him.