With his most recent album Icarus, London-based singer-songwriter Aaron Taylor reimagines the tale of the titular figure, allegorizing the story through the lens of love and loss. His fate is sealed from a single, fragile moment in which he either forgets or actively ignores the fact that the merciless heat of the sun will ultimately doom him, and that, once his wax wings inevitably melt and he begins to fall, there will be no one able to save him. The sun is his irresistible tempter, the proverbial apple of Icarus’s eye that he simply cannot deny nor avoid as he sets his sights on ascending higher in the sky. ![]() Icarus, overcome with a lust for danger and desire to test the limits of his humanity, is the composer of his own undoing. ![]() The story of Icarus is generally regarded as a classical tragedy, a cautionary tale revealing the dangers of hubris and vanity. Desperately flapping his naked arms, he plummets into the sea and drowns instantly, leaving his father to grieve the loss of his beloved son. He soon flies so close to the sun that the wings do, indeed, melt away, leading to his tragic fall from thousands of feet in the air. Unconcerned by his father’s advice, Icarus takes off into the limitless skies and never looks back, ascending higher and higher until he treads into dangerous territory. He must learn to balance himself and navigate the between-space in order to fly safely. ![]() The boy, Icarus, is warned by his father to not fly too close to the sun, as the heat will cause the wax to melt and the wings to falter, but also to not to fly so low that he might collide with the earth. In one of the most well-known tales of Greek mythology, a boy receives a pair of beautiful wax wings handcrafted by his father so that he may fly away to escape certain doom. I flew too high, left fear on the ground / I touched the sky and never looked down / you were the light I couldn’t resist / I asked for love, I asked amiss… I loved you as Icarus loved the sun (too close, too much) / now look at the state of us, what have we done? (we’re far too gone).” Aaron Taylor, “Icarus” (2020)
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