I Dreamed A Dream By Caleb Hyles: Music Analysis

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Everyone who knows me, realizes I have an incredible love for musicals because all the music conveys such emotion and stories with every word that’s carefully designed to fit into this bigger picture that sometimes isn’t found in other genres of music. Les Misérables is probably my favorite, I’ve seen it live multiple times and still listen to the album weekly at the very least, so this led to me finding covers and versions on YouTube – which led me to finding a cover of “I Dreamed a Dream” by Caleb Hyles. This song in the musical is sung by Fantine, a young mother who was recently thrown out of her factory job and she has no where to go and no one to turn to so she laments on the fairytale notion she had of life when she met this man who swept …show more content…

Caleb makes the decision to keep the pronouns used, which talk about this man coming into his life and how he dreamed they could be together forever, but he was left in the dust by this man coming into his life, using him, and then disappearing. The presence of God is very heavy-handed throughout all the songs in this musical, but in this cover, it takes on a different meaning as now the relationship being sung about isn’t only an unwed couple, it’s a gay couple. Whether this is sung while thinking of the time Les Misérables was set in, the 1800’s, or taking a more modern approach to this song there are ideas that being gay is something to be ashamed of especially when it comes to some religious sects. This version of “I Dreamed a Dream” is a gay man believing that somehow, despite how wrong he was taught this relationship was, he could live happily with this amazing man that came into his life. He sees this relationship as the start of something beautiful, with a person that pushes him out of his comfort zone in the best ways before taking him back to a place that could be theirs. But, despite all this hope he had, he was abandoned and now he’s left homeless, without family or shelter, and it seems the wraith of God is unforgivably targeting him because of this dream that however wrong this feeling, this relationship, might be he cannot seem to let it go –

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