This is it. The vagabond Danielle Balbuena, known professionally as 070 Shake, has discovered a place that could sustain her restless heart and mind from now on until death and thereafter. The album “Petrichor” is an homage to all the moments in her life that led her to this great revelation. Balbuena reflects on her past relationships, upbringing and internal struggles, all of which have led her to this divine realization—that love is a state of mind, a place of forgiveness. As she exists on Earth and beyond her physical being on “Sin” (“In a dream state/but I’m still awake”), she yearns to find the aforementioned place. She longed to find a place where love is unconditional, where the tap never runs empty, where her soul could rest eternally.
On “What’s Wrong With Me,” Balbuena searches throughout her life but can never find a place that isn’t ephemeral, “Just when I feel safe, then this turned to escape room/Right when I escape, feel displaced from this place/I’ve been displayed, then disgraced, then dismembered.” In the past, Balbuena was not always a vagabond by choice; she or her partner would leave if either would “run out of love.”
This divine realization, the discovery of a new unconditionally loving place, was the spiritual acceptance that love isn’t what she once thought it was. On “Blood On Your Hands,” Balbuena wants something that isn’t tangible and can’t be held on to, no matter how much she tries to keep it within her grasp, “Oh, you got a watch?/Oh, you care about time?/Oh, you hold onto things that eventually/You gon’ have to leave behind?” “Petrichor” is Balbuena’s redefinition of love.
070 Shake asks her audience (and herself) a series of questions on “Lungs,” “What comes first, the love or the heart?” Balbuena attempts to decipher if love is innate—are we born with hearts that cause us to love, or does love manifest through a feeling/mindset regardless of how our hearts feel? She asks, “What comes first, the high or the drug?” The two questions parallel each other as Shake aligns the feeling of love with the feeling of being high and the physical heart with the physical drug. Before asking these two questions, she states, “I want to inhale your life in my lungs.” She refers to someone other than herself, presumably to a partner, to say they have something she wants to hold within herself as if their life were a source of oxygen—or perhaps a drug.
The story within “Petrichor” describes a few aspects of the relationship between Balbuena and her partner as she is redefining what she describes love to be. She tries to find out how tangible love can be, how long she can hold onto it, and if the feeling can be exchanged from one person to the next, “Hit me if you want to, your pain, I am lucky to feel…Yeah, and if I die, I want you to be the one to kill me.” The voice of Balbuena’s now girlfriend, Lily-Rose Depp, can be heard in a very personal ending monologue on “Blood On Your Hands.” Depp says, “Indulge in the pain/Love the pain, even/Let the pain cook in my belly/Regurgitate the pain, say you’re making art/Say you have someplace useful to put it.” Balbuena and Depp sing, both expressing hurt and sadness at the expense of their relationship. They believe they are perfect mirrors of each other, reflecting their versions of love and hurt back at each other, “soul mates.”
Now that Shake has met her match, she feels as though no one could compare on “Love” (“Said I found the one/That’s enough for me/Run past the gun/Love me endlessly”). This relationship has shown her that love has to be broken and willingly repaired to be considered love truly—it is a conscious choice more so than just a feeling on “Never Let Us Fade” (“I don’t know what love is, but I know what it’s not”). This sentiment is shown on various tracks as Balbuena confronts the idea that people will change throughout their lives and often must choose to continue relationships as they change. Love is to be accepting of someone as they might become unrecognizable because we can’t hold onto the way things–or people–have been in the past. When the feeling of love runs out, and she realizes how fleeting love can be, she decides not to be a vagabond. Instead, she chooses to stay in the relationship and keep trying to repair what they built together in every universe that will continue this cycle. This is the end.
