I’m your typical nostalgic daydreamer on this one. I often think back with fondness on some of the things I grew up with.

Take music (my love of the moment) for example:

Real instruments, complex and interesting melodies, sometimes lasting over 10 minutes long and somehow not even feeling repetitive. Then the lyrics… I call them sung poetry. Deep, sad or funny, but always clever in some way. Songwriters were wordsmiths in their own right.

As it turns out, nostalgia is fueling a whole cultural movement right now. It’s called “Newtro” (New Retro). The term was coined in South Korea back in 2018.

It seems to have gone way beyond the Korean shores. Have you noticed the upsurge of interest in period dramas, epic fantasies with a medieval feel, with old castles, archaic way of living, so on and so forth?

Nostalgia and escapism seem to work well together.

Something about the ways people dressed, talked and behaved in the past feels so otherworldly, intriguing and appealing. It makes the perfect world to escape to, through the written page or on the screen.

In music, I feel the same nostalgia coloured Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak‘s collaboration album “An evening with Silk Sonic”. Real instruments, retro feel, back to basics.It speaks to my own nostalgia.

The smooth, melodic groove and overtones of “Leave the door open” inspired me to go in the same direction in my compositions from now on. Here’s what someone said about my song “Olivia,”

But shameless plug aside, romanticizing the past is nothing new. Most of us will have a soft spot for how some things were when we grew up.But why is this turning into something bigger than isolated stories? My guess is that, as all movements, it is fuelled by current events and sentiments.

Think about it.

The last few years have been an upheaval on so many levels. A pandemic, then war, now hyperinflation, against a backdrop of division and confusion, a sense that we are losing our grip on reality as a society.Is it any wonder that most of us long for that past?

We need a change of scenery. But instead of fantasizing about the future, we subconsciously try to travel back in time.Maybe we feel like revisiting, exploring much simpler times, happier times, go back to basics.

That’s my take. What about you? Are you more into sci-fi or have you been bitten by the nostalgic bug too?

R.