I’ve been wanting to get GUEST DOWN (what do we think of the name?) started for a while, sharing my friends’ writing on this rinky dink little newsletter, and a perfect opportunity came along. Today, August 20th, 2026, the album Blonde by Frank Ocean turns ten years old, which is pretty hard to think about. In fact, I often try not to think about how fuckin fast these years are flying by! It’s an album I treasure, it played a huge part in my accepting of my queerness, and has been soundtrack to many a yearn bathed in the nighttime city light that still seeps through closed curtains.

I considered writing something myself, but remembered that this album is deeply beloved by one of my best friends, frequent musical collaborators, and someone I would call an aspirational hater: Evan Thomas. He owns everything Frank has ever put out, has seen him perform front row, and has been following Frank’s career almost religiously for over fifteen years. There’s really no one I would rather have ring in Guest Down, and no one I’d rather have made me cry with an essay about Blonde (as I have already done twice). I hope you get to do the same.

But before that!

Some news:

I have a ko-fi page! If you wanted to support this newsletter with money, you can do so here!

I’ll be performing as Ghost Down in my beloved Buffalo, New York this Saturday, August 22nd. I’m going to try to record and release the set too!

Today: HeySong Sarsaparilla from Taiwan.

The round-up today will be short and sweet, just like this can; but nothing on this earth will ever be as short as this sawed-off shotgun of a beverage was sweet. It felt like I was punched in the mouth by the Kimbo Slice of Sugar, and nary the bite of birch oil was to be found in this admittedly magnificent red can. But, I still kinda liked it despite my teeth aching after.

HeySong Sarsaparilla: 3/10

Frank Ocean - Blonde
[2016, Boys Don’t Cry]

I. “We’ll let you guys prophesy, we gon’ see the future first. Living so the last night feels like a past life.”

In the weeks leading up to the release of Blonde, Jesse and I had sporadically watched Frank Ocean build a staircase on a tiny MacBook screen in our apartment above Cafeteria in New Paltz. RIP Cafeteria, the quintessential third place in a town that desperately needed them. 

I somehow guessed, correctly, the day that Blonde was going to come out. I had a party the day before (titled DROP THE ALBUM, FRANK) and DJed for a bunch of friends, many of whom I’m still fortunate enough to call my best friends. Most everyone had gone home the following morning by the time Blonde dropped. Everyone that stayed listened to it for the first time on the speakers in the family living room. 

II. “You ain't a kid no more, we'll never be those kids again”

It was a decade ago. While the album and the experience of listening to it for the first time still feels so fresh, it feels inaccurate to say it was a record that was ahead of its time. For me, Blonde exists in a space that is/was nostalgic for a time that hadn’t fully happened yet, and it continues to reveal more to me with each passing year. This is a major factor in why it’s stood the test of time for me.

III. “But it’s just me and no you, stayed up until my phone died”

Frank wrote channel ORANGE, his previous record, in an astonishingly short period of time. It was something like two weeks from start to finish. 

In the sole interview that he did for the Blonde “press tour” (if you could even call it that), Frank talked candidly about suffering from writer’s block for a year during the making of Blonde and Endless. He would stare at the notes app on his phone until the lyrics came to him. Frequently, they wouldn’t. He would go into the studio, stare at the equipment for hours on end, and come up with nothing he liked. One of my generation’s greatest songwriters simply couldn’t figure out what he was trying to say. The thing that eventually broke this cycle was reconnecting with a childhood friend from New Orleans and being fully reminded of his roots. This connection made him consciously shift toward making the album more autobiographical, and the music and lyrics began pouring out.

IV. “Keep a place for me.”

Through this newly reinvigorated writing process, Blonde became an album about trying to understand ourselves through our experiences with the other people in our lives while our great burden of ego is constantly getting in the way. But it’s also a record obsessed with physicality and perception. Being seen, touched, remembered, and (mis)understood. The body exists as something temporary and the mind exists as something that is permanent and tangible. It attempts to answer some of the questions he posed to himself on channel ORANGE, particularly on “Pink Matter”: “What do you think my brain is made for? Is it just a container for the mind?”

On Blonde, he is practically screaming his answer into the void: I am here, I am tangible, and I am real. To quote Robyn for a second, “why can’t you see me?”

V. “I’m in front of you.”

“Facebook Story” is a song that most view as a skip, but to me, it’s one of the most important moments on the record. It’s this weirdly funny, postmodern response to “Close to You,” which comes right after it on the tracklist. “Close to You” is quite direct in its focus on physical closeness and intimacy, while “Facebook Story” takes that same anxiety about connection and moves it into the online world. The author and their former lover both have this rigid idea of what a relationship is supposed to be, and when a loved one doesn’t fit into this highly specific idea, they’d rather reject the entire premise of the relationship than bend their ways for their partner. The author, in particular, desires connection on his terms and his terms only. Meanwhile, neither person in this relationship is really meeting the other where they are. Similar contradictions are explored on nearly every track.

This feels especially significant in the context of Frank himself. He was a terminally online person before channel ORANGE released in 2012. Tumblr was a huge part of how he communicated; he was unusually accessible for an artist of his stature, especially compared to his almost mythical level of privacy that would materialize over the next decade and a half. At the time, his practical disappearance after channel ORANGE was unheard of for a generationally talented pop star in their prime. At the time, there wasn’t really the same cultural understanding of deliberately opting out of being online. As Millenials, we were basically expected to have an internet presence. Everyone was supposed to be reachable. Thankfully, it seems we are moving away from that, while other, more toxic parasocial tendencies take their place, but that’s a topic for another essay.

VI. “Still got some good nights memorized, when I look back, it’s feeling alright.”

On nearly every track on Blonde, haunting background vocals and music fold in on themselves like a star collapsing. Words and their deliveries are fluid and cascade like water. It’s breathtakingly direct and tender, and abstract when it needs to be, but it’s always deeply moving. I see these background glimmers as the whispers of the people we’ve been so blessed to cross paths with, even if they’re no longer in our lives for whatever reason. The people that shaped us always stay with us, almost as ghosts drifting in and out of our consciousness.

VII. “Stick by me, close by me. You were fine. You were fine here.”

All of this makes Blonde feel like a document of someone trying to figure out what connection even means after realizing that being known and being truly seen are two completely different things. This is partly why I believe Blonde is Frank’s final album, as much as I don’t want to believe it; he simply doesn’t have answers to these huge existential questions. These contradictions seep into every track, and you can’t put them back in the box.

“Ivy” feels like a memory fighting with itself. “Self Control” is about a relationship that significantly affected both of them but was ultimately impossible to maintain. “White Ferrari,” in my opinion Frank’s magnum opus, dissolves the boundary between memory, fantasy, love, and identity. “Godspeed” is the radical act of loving someone enough to let them go. 

There’s this constant push and pull throughout the album to determine some kind of structure for things that are fundamentally messy and unknowable.

VIII. “Spending each day of the year…”

On “White Ferrari,” we hear this interpolation of the Beatles’ “Here, There, and Everywhere.” Securing approval to interpolate a Beatles track is notoriously difficult, and hearing that track for the first time hit me like a truck. It was the moment on my first listen that I first broke down and cried. 

By changing the lyric from “making each day of the year,” to “spending each day of the year,” while keeping the melody, Frank repurposed this optimistic ode to romantic devotion to instead evoke emotional fragility, the transactional nature of some relationships, grief, and a fading past. Given the song’s subject matter; it has this immense added weight: “White Ferrari” was his brother’s favorite song before he tragically passed away in a car crash at the age of 18. 

IX. “You say I’m changing on you, I feel like Selena.”

After the emotional gravity and metaphysical musings of “White Ferrari,” “Siegfried,” and “Godspeed” in a row, “Futura Free” brings everything back home. When Frank plays through old interviews with his friends and family, we arrive at the realization that imagination itself is a form of reality and that our memories are the tangible. It’s a clear-eyed statement, and it’s bravely intimate coming from such a private artist. Why must we insist on having our perceptions dictate our lives? Memories are imagined anyway. They say you only actually “remember” a memory a few times, before your recollection becomes a memory of a memory.

Blonde doesn’t give you the answers, but it dials in on them on an immensely personal way, inviting you to come to your own conclusions. I’ve changed enough over the last ten years that I hear almost entirely different themes in it now. There’s always more to be revealed on each listen.

X. “Less morose and more present, dwell on my gifts for a second, a moment. One solar flare, we’re consumed, so why not?”

Even if we like to pretend that we don’t, many of us spend so much of our lives trying to have other people understand us, control how we’re perceived, preserve our memories, and turn messy feelings into clean narratives. We do our best. But maybe these questions don’t actually need answering. Maybe the real answer is that you just have to meet your people where they are. 

A decade on, what I take away most from Blonde is this: We need to show our people love while they’re still in our lives. And it needs to be active and intentional, with genuine respect and care. Thats all we’ve got at the end of it all.

“That’s a pretty fuckin fast (ten years) flew by.”

Evan Thomas (he/him) is a writer, musician, and DJ based in Kingston, NY. He produces and performs music as Nicer Days and is the founder of The Golden Rule, a House music collective and ongoing party series. A lifelong resident of the Hudson Valley, he has been a staple in the Hudson Valley music and arts community for well over a decade.

instagram.com/nicerdays
instagram.com/goldenrulekingston
nicerdays.bandcamp.com
mixcloud.com/nicerdays

Everyone, please go listen to Evan’s DJ sets on MixCloud. He’s my favorite DJ, and I say that without a hint of hyperbole. Be safe and enjoy the rest of your summer, and I’ll be back with something new real soon.

-Will