When you’ve spent untold hours obsessing over something, you start to see it everywhere you look. For fans of The Legend of Zelda, every triangle can start to look like a Triforce, every ruddy canoe the majestic King of Red Lions. Most of the time, this is just your brain on Zelda overdrive; simply a trick of the mind. Every now and then, though, it isn’t a trick, and you find a little piece of Hyrule out there in the ‘real’ world.
The multi-instrumentalist Owen Pallett released his first two albums in the mid-2000s under the moniker of ‘Final Fantasy’, a not-too-subtle allusion to his own love of tabletop and video games, which girds much of his early work. His sophomore effort, He Poos Clouds, is itself loosely structured around the eight schools of magic from Dungeons and Dragons. The title track of this record is where the curious individual will find an unexpected shout-out to the Legend of Zelda series.
One defining trait of Pallett’s work is his sweeping orchestral arrangements, which lends many of his albums a sense of scope and grandeur that we often hear in the soundtracks to many Legend of Zelda games. “He Poos Clouds” is certainly no exception. As the track builds to its peak, Pallett relates a series of ambitious lines:
“Gotta fulfill the seven prophecies!
Gotta be a friend to grandmother!
Gotta rescue Michael from the White Witch!
Gotta find and kill my shadow self
Gotta dig up every secret seashell”
The delight of finding such unabashed references to Zelda in an otherwise pleasant and intriguing tune was really something special. The imagined quest to seek and defeat a shadowy doppelganger while striving to complete a set of elusive baubles seems to be a perfect thematic fit to the track’s tone. There’s also a Narnia reference in there, for those keeping score at home, though what the first two lines refer to, I can’t quite say (please leave a comment if you know!).
The track itself was allegedly born out of a childhood crush Pallett had on none other than Link himself, a life experience maybe a few Zelda Universe readers can perhaps relate to (and who could blame them).
He Poos Clouds would go on to win Canada’s inaugural Polaris Music Prize in 2006, beating out excellent shortlisted entries from other indie heavyweights such as Metric, the New Pornographers, Broken Social Scene, and Wolf Parade. Pallett continues to work both as a solo artist (now under his own name) and as a contributor of orchestral parts in songs by a wide range of artists, including Arcade Fire, Stars, Grizzly Bear, The National, R.E.M., Taylor Swift, Frank Ocean, and Caribou.
For all other things Owen Pallett, check out his personal website.
