Pretentious Mix Tapes I Made In High School

Sounds come in and out of the ether on Channel Orange, both in the form of vocal samples—Hunter S. Thompson’s mantra of “Too weird to live, too rare to die” surfaces for moment during “Lost”—and in the music itself, oscillating subtly as if Ocean’s trying to fine-tune a radio to the perfect frequency, or maybe figuring out just how much the listener ought to hear.

Channel Orange is concerned with moments, both small and large…

When he’s not singing about the problems of others, he’s singing about the complications of that first love, often rendering them in colors. It’s a decision that feels both delightfully strange and makes perfect sense, given that Ocean suffers from synesthesia, a condition that causes someone to interpret various sensations through the lens of color. When Frank first fell in love, he’s said, everything felt orange