The Music and Planet Project

“Following” by Danny Arcane is an incisive slice of commentary around today’s social media landscape and the demands it creates of artists, often to no avail. Through Blur-inspired guitars and Weezer-esque vocal melodies, Arcane effectively makes his point while also creating a fun and cathartic musical experience.

Sonically, the song is defined by a simple two-guitar attack and crystal clear vocal production. The guitars follow a time-tested formula to develop excitement: clean, palm-muted guitar picking in the verses followed by hard-hitting distorted power-chord strumming in the chorus. This simple winning strategy is actually surprisingly hard to find in a lot of the rock songs of the modern day. Here, in Arcane’s music, you can almost imagine him up on stage hitting the distortion pedal on and off as he goes between the verses and choruses, creating a refreshing sense of live performance within the recorded track.

In the lyrics, Arcane comments on the emptiness of social media and the exhaustion of having to stay relevant through constant content creation. His music video for the song features him lying back on a couch while various familiar scenes from the social media world appear on the phone he holds in front of the camera. The scenes features the artist himself re-creating various cliches often seen in your reels – a clip captioned “I wrote this song about – insert generic life event”, a scene of a person trying on various outfits and labeling them with generic titles, a fake “teeny desk concert”, to name a few. In writing these words, Arcane is likely to strike a chord here with a broad audience. In fact, although we rarely put it into words, who among us isn’t exhausted and numbed by the artificiality and shallowness of social media in today’s day and age? 

“Social media is really one of the most important channels to utilize as a music artist but it’s so exhausting. From constantly creating content to seeing the same recycled content, it really takes a toll on my mental health, especially when you realize just how fake it all really is. I wrote this at a time I was fed up with the matrix that is our social media identities and all the hate there is online, it made me feel like people only follow others on these platforms to see them fail,” said the artist when describing his new song. 

If you’re looking for music with a message that resonates, Danny Arcane’s new single Following is a good place to start. With insightful lyrics and music that scratches the 90s alt rock itch, Following could very well be a song you find yourself playing on repeat. 

Stream Following here.