“Is this Oktaf Kanis’ best single yet? Release after release he has brought the whole package, but somehow this package feels a little stronger.”
It’s no secret that Jakarta born singer-songwriter has been rampant on the rock scene, evoking new music ahead of his album release this year. My Radio stars a collision of satisfyingly impulsive melodies and delightfully punchy sounds.
The story behind My Radio is portrayed as multiplex, reflected in the depths of the instrumental sequence and vocal arrangement. I’m referring to the chorus in particular, where the more you listen to it the more invited you feel by it. This emphasis of My Radio being an ‘invitation’ becomes prime in our understanding of the song. Kanis’ elucidates this, stating that “The content in the lyrics of ‘My Radio’ is ‘a kind of story journey in which a couple whose lover is involved in a problem within because of something that has caused him to become like that, then in the midst of that problem a friend from one of the one couple who always invites him by giving a kind message to listen to a radio broadcast so that his lover is entertained and forgets a problem that is happening to him….”.
He further said, “…’Somebody told me to (listen to the radio) in the lyrics it can be concluded that an invitation to listen to the broadcast radio, and from the term ‘radio broadcast’ it can be interpreted broadly, it can be a kind of podcast or a playlist of songs, depending on how each listener wants to describe it.”
And it’s not just the interpretations of lyrics that are varied, seeing as we can hear a range of emotions throughout My Radio catered to by Oktaf’s fields of semantics, emphasis of connection between listeners and the music and his advanced flow of storytelling. The list goes on, especially after taking a few listens and paying close attention to the shifts from verse to chorus, chorus to bridge.
Oktaf Kanis took the chronology of My Radio, linking back to its layers of meaning – he said, “In each stanza of this song has a different content, in the verse to the pre-chorus it is a kind of expression of the heart of a couple who has a lover who is in trouble, and in the chorus it’s a greeting because they have received some kind of message from a friend who has invited him to listen to his radio broadcasts.
You can listen to the song here:
And here:
