dawn, twice
Both Oxygen and Sci-Fi started as a song called, “Dawn” in August of 2021. No is officially credited on either song, but with production similar to Carl Thomas’ My Valentine, fans point to Thomas’ song as the ultimate inspiration for Oxygen and Sci-Fi. Oxygen opens with a blend of a piano, acoustic guitar, and crooning wordless vocals.
oxygen
Sean opens his version with his lyrics:
Let me not, let me not
I better not,
It’d be best if I stop
Let me not, go apeshit
Full Bape
These lyrics set the stage for a man coming to terms with the end of a romance.
I was down, no
Yeah, I was down, no…
No escape
There’s no escape
“I was down, no…yes,” the speaker waffles back and forth. This waffling, dithering, persists for the rest of the verse.
Lupe out my town, had to skate
We just said goodbye, but it’s straight
I fuck with her vibe, it’s okay
Got me hypnotized, in a daze
Protect my mind
Protectin’ what’s mine
A production can be gorgeous and remain a misreading. Oxygen is a physical experience. Everything is where it belongs: the low end arrives when it should, each element of music has its own square footage, and the whole record carries the posture of a checked on something expensive. Everything underneath the vocal is built to amplify the song’s melodic line. There’s “space” around Sean Leon’s voice, and his hook lands in your sternum. Given that Sean Leon is not a household name, the record uses that: when a less familiar voice arrives first, the arrival of a familiar one feels like an entrance.
Whoever finished Oxygen appreciated its melancholy and built a room to display it. Nothing leaks out of Oxygen, the record is close to perfect; it’s a stately song with no seams showing. Put the record on, and it sort of…happens to you. When I play this song in my car, at the right volume, you can feel it in your chest. When I first heard it, I was still living a charmed life, and would blast the record while driving through the winding roads that serve as an overture to the Hotel Bel Air. (The Hotel Bel Air remains my favorite place in Los Angeles.) Probably for the first fifty plays, I kept asking myself, “How is it that this is a Sean Leon song?”
sci-fi
I was late to the Sci-Fi listening because I didn’t shell out two hundred and fifty bucks for the that carried it and had been floating around for three or four years. I have no regrets about my decision to abstain from such electronic purchases. While Sci-Fi is the same song as Oxygen, in a lot of ways, they couldn’t be more different. When I first heard Sci-Fi, I was caught off guard by the intimacy of this version of the song, how less stately it sounds. Less polished, raw and unfinished. The acoustic strings that make Oxygen a lush experience are missing on Sci-Fi, with a synthesizer playing a string sound much more reminiscent of the Carl Thomas Valentine. It’s tempting to look at Sci-Fi as being the demo version of Oxygen, but if there is a “right” version of a record (and they’re usually is), then it’s Sci-Fi and the reasons, once you understand them, illuminate something else: the interpretation of Sci-Fi as Oxygen is something of a misreading of the record. To give this song the polish Sean Leon gives it is to almost “miss the point” of the song. One could never speak with too much authority about an artist’s intentions. But reader, this writer subscribes to .
Where melody is the focal point of Oxygen, a story is the core focus of Sci-Fi; it reveals just how much its finishing producer sees music in intellectual terms. Sci-Fi opens with Kim Kardashian’s SNL monologue. You’re no longer in a song about a man’s feelings. Kim’s voice is warm and public and slightly performed. A marriage is being narrated to an audience, on a comedy show, with a band waiting.
Opening on somebody else’s television appearance is a compositional choice. The texture is mismatched on purpose: none of it matches what follows, because the song is about a private matter made public and here is the public version arriving first, in worse fidelity, with a crowd attached. Then the record starts, and this version of the record sounds digital and damaged at the same time. Analog damage is hiss and warmth. Digital damage is . Sean Leon’s vocals lack the space he would have given them, and did when he was given the chance. In Sci-Fi, much of the that made Oxygen elegant is gone, artifacts kept instead of fixed. Elements arrive slightly wrong and are permitted to stay wrong. Though the melody is still here, the track underneath is more in service of the painful vocals, so what was a soaring epic becomes a man struggling to mumble through a pretty melody with nothing holding him up. Somewhere in there he mentions hearing Morgan Freeman’s voice during sex. On Oxygen that plays as a joke. On Sci-Fi, it plays as dissociation.
The hook, performed weakly by a voice known for its bravado, is a question:
Welcome to the Sci-Fi
Make a choice, oxygen or Wi-Fi?
Clearly, he took the Wi-Fi. What’s amazing is that nothing in the writing changed. Even the vocal takes are largely identical. The meaning inverted because of the arrangement and difference in sonic textures. The waffling that Sean Leon opens the song with resolves towards defeat by the end of the song.
Baby, bye-bye, baby, baby, bye-bye
I’m just going to remove myself
From the situation ’fore I lose myself
From the situation ’fore I lose my health
I can’t control you but I could lose myself
The damage in Sci-Fi’s mix isn’t decoration; the record sounds like the thing it’s about. My Valentine’s strings probably inspired Sci-Fi, and when you play the songs back-to-back, they might share a key. Given this, Oxygen’s polish is a movement away from the song’s inspiration, not a push toward its ideal. Most of the time rough is just rough, and treating every unfinished thing as more honest than a finished one is how you end up defending a naked emperor.
the death of the author
Oxygen isn’t a failure. There’s a version of this essay where I’m just describing my own taste drifting. I heard Oxygen in a different year and a different headspace. Maybe the record didn’t change and I did. You play Oxygen in the car with other people in it. You listen to Sci-Fi at one in the morning, alone, as you’re struggling to understand where everything went wrong. What interests me is what each mix believes the song is about. When thinking about “the death of the author,” we concede that intention doesn’t determine the right version, so the question isn’t which one is better but which one feels true. ‘Death of the author’ is what licenses you to call which of two authorized versions a misreading, which is otherwise an outrageous thing to claim.