Børns is an old soul. You may have already guessed that by listening to his eclectic, heart-wrenching single ‘Past Lives.’ But I sincerely doubt that you can guess the life the man named Garrett Borns at birth lived before this one.
“I was probably a grasshopper,” the Grand Haven, Michigan native tells me over the phone, and with such conviction that it threw me off a little, derailing my mind from responses like "a monk" or "an ancient Roman charioteer" or whatever other weird, miscellaneous answers that come attached to the question of "_Who were you in a past life?"_ “Or a cricket, you know, with like really long legs. And I probably had a really short life and I ended up under a garbage man’s boot or something, just like,” and then the sound of air whistling past his lips, imitating a squishing sound, emanates to my end of the line.
I have to laugh. Gucci-wearing and guitar-wielding Børns as a cricket? Although probably inconceivable five minutes before, I can see it now. His music works on your mind in the same way, twisting impossible stories into something that could be tangible - and possible - for you, too.
You’ll know what I mean if you’ve listened to his debut studio album, _Dopamine_, which was released back in 2015 and that peaked at No. 24 on the US Billboard 200. Songs like "Overnight Sensation" and "Electric Love" emulate the kind of love any hopeless romantic would hope to find for themselves. But they're also, according to Børns, “sort of a grandiose way of talking about” love. Sure, but what’s love if not a feeling that makes you talk about everything in a grandiose way? An emotion that forces you to combust with words about the world that surrounds you? Something that amplifies the mundane into the brilliant, the dull into the dazzling, the cricket into the human?
"Faded Heart," his newly-released single that just dropped today, continues down the path of that grandiose language, in a way that makes heartbreak sound kaleidoscopic. “Galaxy, galaxy,” the song starts off, “Won’t you be my consolation / I need someone to kiss my hands and my feet / and make me feel complete.”
It is yearning, exhaustion, and hope all packaged together in the heart-thudding verses and instrumental of the single. The song is like a plea (“Don’t you break my faded heart,” he begs, while the audio equivalent of shooting stars bursts beneath his heartline of a voice) out into the universe to treat his jaded soul kindly.
“It’s one of those songs that just kinda happened,” he said of the single, which preludes his January 2018 album release. “You know, with the funky bass tones and a drum set and a starry California night. Maybe a little California grass, who knows? But, the song itself is sort of like this lamentation of my own mortality. It’s just kinda about looking up and feeling extremely vulnerable and small as a human.”
Whether he feels small as a human or as tiny as a cricket, one thing is for certain: we have to thank our lucky stars that the universe reincarnated him into Garrett Borns. “And now I’m here making music,” he says of his probable previous life, “like, just chirping my ass off.”
Børns will perform music from his upcoming album starting this fall. The tour will take him across the U.S., to the United Kingdom, and around Europe. Visit [his website](https://www.bornsmusic.com/tour) for more information on dates and locations.
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Written by Chelsey Sanchez
Photos by Chuck Grant
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