The Wandering Star earrings were born from a song Wandering Star by Portishead from the album Dummy. The whole album is a masterpiece that first found me in my teens during the mid 1990s. At the time, it gave sound to those melancholic, coming of age feelings in a way that felt instantly familiar.
Wandering Star a dark and moody song, full of galactic foreboding. The lyrics are deliberately open ended and while they seem rooted in grief, Beth Gibbons’ never gives us anything too specific. Everything is interpretation.
That openness is part of the song’s beauty. The lyrics leave space for the listener, allowing the song to hold many meanings at once. It can become something different for each person, shaped by whatever they’re moving through at the time. A reflection of loss, longing, or simply the weight and wonder of existing.
What I love most about the song is the permission it gives you to truly sink into those deep, dark feelings. “It’s such a lovely day to have to always feel this way” a line that captures the cruelty of emotional heaviness with painful honesty. What stirs in those places is truly painful, but also deeply truthful.
Beth Gibbons’ voice feels fragile yet strangely nurturing, like a small guiding light moving through a swamp of low end bass and warped, scratchy, almost trickster like sounds (probably one of the best DJ scratch solo ever recorded). There’s tension and unease, but also a sense of being held while you move through it.
And then there’s the closing. The swell of the Hammond organ, the moment everything lifts. Wait for the goosebumps and your hairs to stand on end. It’s an absolute masterpiece and perhaps the most iconic trip hop song of the entire genre.
For me, the feelings carried by this song have returned many times since my teens. Its haunting sadness and eerie unease echo deeply with a life spent always moving. Far from my family, far from what I once called home. Drifting from place to place, never fully rooted, never quite sure where home was meant to be.
Being lost is an incredibly vulnerable place to exist.
But there is also a stunning beauty that can exist there. When you look up at the night sky. Vast, endless and luminous, you can feel both lost and deeply connected at the same time. There is a sense of floating, of searching and belonging to something far bigger than yourself. Something as painful as being a lonely wandering star in the darkness can also be incredibly freeing.
Wandering Star is an ode to feeling adrift and to the magic of looking up and realising you belong, wherever you are.
Love,
Candice x
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