Just in time to carry us through the rest of the emotional roller coaster that is Cancer season, Omar Apollo has released his new album, God Said No. Just like Apollo’s previous work, the record consists largely of heartbreak bangers, including the second to last track: “Pedro,” featuring none other than Pedro Pascal.
The song begins with Apollo’s voice filtered through a vocoder, singing, “If meadows was a man / Would you trade me for your land? / Mine still have a misty dew / Something I can offer you.” Then, we hear the dulcet tones of the star of The Last of Us, underscored by minimal, bell-like keys, as he tells a story — via what sounds like a voice note to Apollo — about a time in his life when he was “very shattered.”
In the recording, Pascal shares that at the time of this heartbreak, he had recently finished a job and “was too scared to go back to the U.S.,” because the second wave of COVID had hit Europe. He went from Budapest to Switzerland in order to “buy some time and figure out what I would do before Christmas.”
“I'd had an incredible time on a job, but my heart was pretty shattered by something,” Pascal says. He recalls walking around the Swiss city of Lucerne in a residential area and thinking about the saying. In that moment, the actor says he was brought to his knees by something deceptively simple: a park bench.
And he likes to do it from the back.
“I remember asking the park bench to come alive and save me, 'cause I didn't feel like there was kind of any moment past that moment,” Pascal continues. “But there was. There was.” The song ends with Pascal saying, “I can’t believe I’m sending you this.” Thank God he did, though — if we're assuming the recording is an actual audio message. Either way, Pascal’s story about his moment with the park bench feels like the perfect encapsulation of the total irrationality of heartbreak, and how in its wake, we tend to grasp for meaning in the most unlikely settings.
Just as the voicemail was a prominent feature of hip hop for several decades, it seems as though it's more modern equivalent, the voice note, is having a moment in music. In addition to Pascal’s voice note to Apollo, there was also, of course, the voice note that Charli XCX sent Lorde to ask her to collaborate on the “Girl, so confusing” remix, which left the latter singer “speechless.” Celebs: they’re just like us, exchanging intimate voice notes with their friends and feeling self-conscious about it.
