48) golden hour

Hello and welcome to Learning English with Lyrics! I am your host Jake and today we're talking about the song "golden hour" by JVKE, and yes...that's pronounced the same as my name, and no, I did not write or perform this song. JVKE is a singer who became famous on the app TikTok, and seems to be rising more and more in popularity, and hey. I'm always excited for a guy with my name to do well! His artist name is using the letter "V" in place of the "A". Normally, "V" never makes the "A" sound, but that is how he insists this should be pronounced, so, we'll respect that!

Anyway, on to the song...


When you listen to it, I highly recommend listening to it while looking at the lyrics. He sings the verses quickly, and it's easy to miss what he's saying.

The first thing I want to talk about is found near the end of the first verse. "Where you at tonight?". It's not the best grammar, but you'll hear this used often as slang. "Where you at?" is a pretty simple phrase, that means the same thing as "Where are you?". We could make it a little bit better by adding a verb "Where ARE you at?", though as you can see, the word "at" is a bit uneeded. Why is the word "at" there at all? Well, when speaking about locations "at" is going to be one of our most common prepositions used. Let's say somebody asks you where you are right now? You could respond: "I am AT my house." or "I'm AT the theater." or "I'm AT the store." With this usage, "at" points us to a location. Grammatically, it doesn't really fit in our phrase, but slang doesn't much care about rules. Slang is more concerned with being understood, and in this case, we do understand, so...it works!

The next thing I want to talk about is the word "alibi" at the end of this line. An "alibi" is essentially proof that you are somewhere or doing something specific. Usually, this is only important when we're talking about crime. For example, let's say that at 3pm yesterday, your neighbor's house got robbed, and the thief stole his collection of rare antique forks. The police are interrogating you, thinking that you are the thief who stole the forks! However, you have a receipt from the donut shop on the other side of town, that proves you were buying donuts at the time of the robbery. You have an "alibi". Proof that you were somewhere else during the crime.

In this case, our singer is being asked by his mother where he is, and he has no excuse, except to say that he's with a girl. It seems like this was supposed to be a secret. Oops.

The last thing I want to talk about today, is the line in the second verse, "driving nowhere fast." To "drive nowhere fast" or more commonly, to "go nowhere fast" is an idiom. Remember, an idiom is a figurative phrase, with a non-literal meaning. Can you figure out what it means?

"Nowhere" is the opposite of "everywhere". "Everywhere" is all places. Any place that is possible. It's the equivalent of "everything", except for places. "Nowhere" is sort of like "nothing". "Nowhere" is NOT a location, just like "Nothing" is the absence of things.

So if you are "going nowhere", that means that you aren't making any progress. You aren't moving forward. You aren't moving backward. You aren't moving. So to go "nowhere" "fast", means...well it means the same thing. No matter how fast you are going, you will never get "nowhere".

It means that you are doing a lot to do nothing. Sometimes this is intentional. Other times...it's not.

Well, that's all we have for today. I hope that you enjoyed today's episode, and I hope to talk to you soon!