Sachi Keiko - “Screentime”
Photo by Aria Goodman
From Las Vegas, NV, we invite you to feast your ears upon “Screentime,” the latest single from Sachi Keiko.
For those of you lost in a loveless relationship or picking up the pieces after the end of one, we’ve got just the song for you. “Screentime” digs its emotional claws into the listener at the press of the play button, with the soft and dreamlike bell tones of a xylophone beneath a raw and vulnerable vocal performance. Keiko seizes every opportunity to paint a vivid picture with her voice through lyrics that describe the monotony of an affair after the feelings have faded.
Painfully accurate subject matter aside, “Screentime” beholds a magnificent arrangement, with new elements arriving over the song’s five-minute duration. The first to arrive is the piano, which grants the first third of the song with an intimate backdrop that delicately matches the melancholic lyrical content. As the song enters its second third, we are greeted by the rhythm section– deep notes from a bass and a vintage-tinged drum kit inject the track with a softly swaying heartbeat, leaving the devastation intact.
As the song rolls into its conclusion, shimmering and reverberating guitar notes cast triplets across the production, furnishing “Screentime” with the peak of its gradual and glorious crescendo. It is not often that a song comes along right when we needed to hear it, but sometimes the stars align (even if only to mock you) and we are truly grateful to have this track available to hear any time we wish– we are quite certain that you will appreciate the hell out of it as well.
About the track, Keiko adds: “’Screentime’ is a story of misplaced love and attention - the feeling of being nostalgic for a relationship while you’re still in it, and the out-of-body experience of watching it fall apart in real time. It’s not a cry of desperation, but rather stems from a deep love and wanting to be seen by one’s partner. I don’t think either character in the song is a villain or foolish for wanting more, but there’s something tragic about the mismatched dreams they’re having - one of breaking free and starting a new chapter, and the other to live contently in a fantasy, going through the motions of a relationship that has already ended.”