Hrishikesh Hirway

Why are sunsets pretty? It’s not just that the light is disappearing; it’s because of the relationship between sunlight and the atmosphere. The color blue, because of its shorter wavelengths, gets scattered away by air particles, while reds and oranges remain. The clouds catch and reflect the light. It’s winter when I hear In the Last Hour of Light, and during these shorter days that lead to the year’s end, it becomes my soundtrack to many varied, brilliant sunsets. The clouds—in so many shapes, stretched like cotton batting, piled like snow drifts—seem soaked with pink, like watercolors pooling. The first time I am in the same room as Hrishikesh Hirway, it is the spring of 2005. I’m a sophomore in college, on my first date with a boy at the American Legion in Wallingford. We’re there to see The One AM Radio, Hrishikesh’s moniker before he started playing under his own name. In my memory, Hrishi is alone on the dark stage, producing music that startles me: how is this possible, I wonder? The sound is layered and electronic and robust, all originating from one person. It feels as though he’s the Wizard of Oz. Nine years later, the man who becomes my husband introduces me to his college friend Hrishi. My husband is not the same boy who drove me to Wallingford in a borrowed car, though the story would have been better that way. (Where narrative calls for neatness, life doesn’t quite oblige.) It’s now been over a decade after meeting Hrishi properly. We have changed, as people, in ways both articulable and not. In Wallingford, my main preoccupation was if my date would kiss me. (After the show, he did.) I’m amazed by how different my priorities are at this very moment, aware that they will, someday in the future, fade into memory, too. In the Last Hour of Light is interested in these twists of life: it’s interested in the moments and people who shape us before they vanish. These songs are about the ephemeral, and about grief in its many facets: the anguish of losing a parent, the possibility of a child, friendships lost to time. This album is about certain events in life that feel so encompassing, so consuming—even impossible to endure—and the unassuming moments, too. It’s about how all of it forms the unique constellation of a person’s life. In the Last Hour of Light is aware that the brilliant stuff of life—all the things that transform us, the people or experiences from whom we never recover—comes to us like sunsets, every single day. It’s as mundane and miraculous as that.

Photo Credit: Elisha Christian