Review: "7-Eleven" by Bladee

When I’m homesick I listen to the song “7-Eleven” by Bladee. The main part I like is the opening lines, which are also the chorus.

Waiting for forever for my weapon

Waiting for my best friend outside 7-Eleven

Sometimes I just wanna go to heaven

When I’m coming home they call me vännen

Bladee is from Sweden, a place he clearly loves, but he’s travelled a lot. “7-Eleven” is from 2016; Bladee first left Sweden to go to America in 2014 to support Yung Lean on his early tours.

7-Eleven is the one of the main convenience stores in Sweden, especially in urban areas like Stockholm, where Bladee is from. Scandinavian 7-Elevens are very clean, but also very cozy.

What does each line of the chorus mean?

• Waiting for forever for my weapon. This is the most difficult and abstract line. I think it’s saying that he’s waiting for a magical salvation to appear, like waiting for a sword to emerge from a lake while on his quest. He’s waiting for a long time, and it still hasn’t come. He’s not sure if it will.

• Waiting for my best friend outside 7-Eleven. He’s back at home, before the quest, before he left, just waiting outside the convenience store. There isn’t any bigger ambition for magical salvation in this line; this line is decidedly nonfantasy compared to the last one. But it’s still important, whatever he and his friend were doing back home.

• Sometimes I just want to go to heaven. This one is pretty straightforward. Sometimes he wants to die, because that would be simpler than the complexities of the current quest.

• When I’m coming home they call me vännen. Vännen is the Swedish word for friend. When Bladee comes home to Sweden, they still call him friend the same way they used to. When he comes back home from the quest, regardless of whether he has the weapon or not, they still care about him, and he’s still one of them.

I like the parallelism of the first two lines, both opening with “waiting”, while describing different but adjacent feelings.

When I’m homesick listening to this song in New York City, I think about sitting outside the Casey’s General Store in Illinois waiting for my friend. When I lived in Illinois, he and I would hike deep out into rural cornfield country, where Casey’s is the main convenience store. Casey’s is kind of a third place in these areas. There’s not many restaurants out there, ten miles from the nearest city, so Casey’s serves pizza. There’s always a few people in there buying something. On our 10+ mile hikes, we’d often get hungry, so one or both of us would go into Casey’s to buy food or an energy drink.

Almost everyone drives to Casey’s, because this area isn’t particularly walkable. Because we were on foot, it took a long time to get to the store once we had decided it was our next destination. So to us it felt like an anticipated oasis.

7-Eleven is a different convenience store, in a different country, but Bladee’s song has the same emotional architecture for me. When I feel like I’m waiting forever for my weapon, I want to be outside the convenience store at home. Sometimes I worry that they won’t call me friend in the same way when I come back, but that hasn’t happened yet.