Noon Dave is in Touch with His Feelings

“I don’t like situationships,” Noon Dave declares, a bold stance in a world ruled by apocalyptic dating rules.  Don’t call your textuationship first. Hit your situationship up 10 hours after they reply to you and all others that makes one wonder if this is the hunger games. “I’m the type that goes all in. I’m either in or nothing,” he tells me with the surety of a Shakespearian poet. Situationships do not make room for the kind of depth he desires to plunge himself into, as they are rather undefined.

The artiste is able to take this stance because he had mingled with situationships before and felt the high of being so drawn to someone that you are eclipsed by their world. “There is a feeling you get; you wish they could be yours. There is a kind of happiness you feel when they are around you. You lose your composure; you can’t get a hold of yourself. You smile a lot,” he explains, almost as if flashbacks are lined up on a strip for him. That wander into undefined territory, one he detests for the unrequitedness of it, led him to craft an unreleased song which he describes as the apex of his emotional honesty and vulnerability.

Vulnerability is a concept the human race continually fails at. But it is a necessary ritual for human connection, for love. Whilst people bungle over vulnerability, holding vigils deciding to offer or withhold it, Noon Dave does not shy away from it. He holds space for it in his artistry. “I try to be vulnerable at least in my music,” he tells me candidly. This loose approach is aided by a comfortability he says must be in place. He joins a list of artistes who let vulnerability sit in their lyrics and drive their chords, one of whom is an inspiration to him: Frank Ocean.

Shortly before I caught up with the singer, I had watched his rendition of Frank Ocean’s Thinking About You, a song that is Cupid’s arrow, stealing every heart that hears it. A classic tale of love that makes you feel like you are fifteen again, has you making plans and packing up your bags. “I love Frank Ocean. I am inspired by him but I don’t make music like him. “I don’t sound like him,” he is quick to clarify. “But you can see his influence in the way I write songs,” he adds. This quickly becomes apparent when I ask about his love tell; how he knows he is in love. At first, he plays hard to get, hitting me with a “You just know” like a leading man in a romcom whose love for the leading lady just dawned on him. I probe further and he replies, echoing Frank Ocean’s sentiment on the Thinking About You track, “You know you are in love when you start thinking about what this could become with that person.”

In Noon Dave’s version of love, there is no place for self. Love is a miracle you accept with open hands and give with outstretched arms, freely. “If you have reasons for loving this person, you don’t genuinely love them. You love how they make you feel, not them.” To him, love is a decision. “Love is hard and easy at the same time,” he chuckles. “But ultimately you have to make the decision to do it every day, to fight, to stay. Love is in the staying,” he concludes.

He is true to this definition and it trickles down into his music. Like in Face Card, a eulogy for the object of his desire. Buried in the praises is a line, “I go dey for you not only when the night is young,” an attestation to his grounded belief that love is indeed in the staying. Staying to tug it out, staying when the sun is high up, staying when the cloud displaces it. Staying–love is in the staying.