You Can Change, So Can I — 14 Songs From 2022
Sing Your Heart Out by Camp Cope
There’s so much love—so many different kinds of love…
Something that I have come to find interesting—genuinely interesting—is what, regardless of the artist’s intention, people take away from a song; like, in the end, what they think it is about, or perhaps more specifically, how they have been able to adapt it into their own lived experiences.
But there is a sentiment within “Anything”—genuine, comforting, and full of love for another individual.
And maybe this is something you do not think about as often as I do, or have, in recent years, but I often think about how there are different kinds of love—romantic, certainly, but there is also platonic love. And in listening to “Anything,” I understood that it was written with a romantic partner in mind, but I felt the sentiments transcended that kind of love, and that Lenker’s unabashed honesty and earnestness in her sentiments could be adapted to a platonic love as well—“I don’t wanna talk about anyone…I wanna sleep in your car while you’re driving,” she requests. “Lay in your lap when I’m crying.”
Two different people selected “Anything” as a song they wanted to talk about when I interviewed them for the podcast I host—one of them really only saw the romantic elements to it, while the other felt there was more of a maternal kind of love found within.
There is so much love—so many different kinds of love.
And I have, and maybe you have as well, spent a lot of this year thinking about change—the changes in others, yes, but also the changes within ourselves that, however difficult or uncomfortable the idea might be, have to be made.
And I have, and maybe you have not, but I hope you have, spent a lot of this year thinking about the line from “Sing Your Heart Out.”—“People change, give them time. If you can change, then so can I.”
“Sing Your Heart Out” is the closing track from Camp Cope’s blistering and incredible third full-length, Running With The Hurricane. Once brash and volatile in their sound, the Australian trio has admittedly found other, possibly more constructive ways to channel their rage through a more thoughtful and restrained sound. Unlike anything else on the record, “Sing Your Heart Out” is the kind of song that was, from the moment it begins, clearly written to be placed last on an album—a beautiful, soaring, utterly devastating moment of release that is, much to my own surprise, more personally meaningful now than it was in March when I first hear the opening notes of the piano come tinkling through the speakers.
“Sing Your Heart Out” is directed, like so many songs, to an off-stage ‘you,’ written and sung with enough ambiguity by Camp Cope’s vocalist and lyricist Georgia McDonald’s that both the ‘you’ in question, as well as the love she references, could go either way—romantic, certainly, but also platonic, which is how I have adapted it into my own lived experiences.
Change—the understanding, and then the acceptance (perhaps a reluctance in both)—is difficult, because if you are like me, you are perhaps selfish. And in that selfishness, specifically in a close friendship, it is easier to see a change as something that might negatively impact you, rather than what is important—which is how the change is something that will be better for your friend.
The acceptance, reluctant or not, arrives in just wanting that person to be happy, and the hope that in how they are growing, or changing, that you are able to grow, and change, too—within yourself, yes, but also alongside them.
People change, give them time. If you can change, then I so can I.
“Sing Your Heart Out” is a song in two distinct parts–the first is McDonald on the piano, her beautiful Australian drawl covering certain words like a blanket, her voice occasionally joined in harmony by the other members of Camp Cope, bassist Kelly-Dawn Helmrich and drummer Sarah Thompson. And this first part, arranged as a mid-tempo ballad, is nothing short of perfect in how well it captures all of the emotions swirling around within the ideas of love and change. “I’d take all the love in me and wrap it around you,” McDonald sings in the first verse; then later, one of the most striking images in the song—“I’d watch the sky of blue turn gold if I had the chance to see it all change, the lines on your face, so beautiful when they move.”
McDonald begins winding down the song’s first part with a declaration that is imperative to understanding the heart of the song, and understanding why “Sing Your Heart Out” is such an important thing for me to hear: “There’s so much love—so many different kinds of love. And I’ll take you on. I’ll give you everything I’ve got. Baby, sing your heart out….”
The song’s second half begins with the rest of the band’s instrumentation coming in—the “lead” bass guitar plucks from Helmrich, and the tumbling percussion from Thompson, all building a rhythm that tucks itself underneath McDonald, and all of it growing to an explosive and surprising finale where everything grows to a raucous peak with the band howling these words over and over again—If you can change, so can I”—creating a torrential noise, but more than that, an important sentiment (hard to face at times, certainly) that reverberated through me this year, and the echoes of it will linger into the next.
Kind of Girl by MUNA
Like I’m not a problem to solve…
And the reason it works, and it works as well as it does, is because it is a totally in earnest homage to a country song—not just one, in particular, but a specific kind of country song that rose to popularity in the late 1990s and very first part of the 2000s—a time when country music was just beginning its flirtations with pop music. It works because it has that kind of sentiment—heartfelt, powerful to the point of being emotionally manipulative, and enormous sounding; even as somber and self-effacing as it can be, it is still based around a catchy, soaring melody. It’s not a ballad—no, not exactly. But it’s close. It is a slow burn leading to a beautiful, and perhaps painful, moment of personal reflection and catharsis.
The songwriting across Muna explores a number of things—lust and desire are themes that appear early on, and a bulk of the album arrives in the form of breakup songs; sometimes there is a sense of heartbreak, yes, but other times there is a real sense of relief. If anything, “Kind of Girl,” in the way it simmers and then builds to a devastating and gigantic chorus, is a song about breaking up with yourself.
Throughout the verses, Muna’s lead singer Katie Gavin explains, per the title, what kind of girl she is—often self-deprecating assessments or, at the very least, rooted in uncomfortable feelings: the kind of girl who makes things too far and presses too hard; the kind who wants everything she can’t get; leaves alone and leaves a mess; will drive you insane and in love with the pain. But even as Gavin is rattling off all of these less-than-flattering traits she often sees in herself, “Kind of Girl” is a song, like many of the songs on Muna, that is inherently about personal growth. She is also the kind of girl who is learning that everything she says isn’t definitive. “I’m not some kind of minor trope who’s never gonna change—that’s so derivative,” she sings quietly in the song’s first verse.
“I’m the kind of girl who owns up to all of my faults—who’s learning to laugh at them all,” Gavin continues at the end of the second verse, before adding one of the song’s more lingering phrasings. “Like I’m not a problem to solve.”
And what struck me the first time I sat with “Kind of Girl,” and really listened to it, and really understood how sincere its intentions were, and what still strikes me now when I listen, months after the album’s release, is the weight of the way Gavin sings the word “dandelion.”
I spent a lot of time at the end of June and beginning of July listening to Muna, and in gathering my thoughts on it, I spent a lot of time and used a lot of words in my review of the record discussing the way the word “dandelion” is pronounced, and how that has to be a deliberate choice on her part—there is no way it couldn’t be. How she stretches it out to sound like “dandy lion,” and that there is something that is both difficult to articulate but inherently heartbreaking about that, and how it serves as the central conceit of “Kind of Girl”—the kind of blind hope, or faith, we have to put in ourselves and in return, want to find a way to change.
I described the chorus to “Kind of Girl” like the sound of someone both running away from and running toward themselves—the music swells, becoming anthemic and triumphant, with Gavin finding the solace within herself needed to keep going. “I like telling stories, but I don’t have to write them in ink,” she reflects. “I could still change the end. At least I’m the kind of girl who thinks I can.”
A surprisingly sonorous, thoughtful, and gorgeous song, “Kind of Girl,” is the kind of small, bright flash of hope we all need to keep moving forward and putting in the work, however insurmountable it might seem at times, to better ourselves.
Weird Goodbyes by The National featuring Justin Vernon
The things we let go of…
One of the handful of new songs The National were playing on their summer tour, and presumably a small window into what could be expected from a new full-length slated for release in 2023, “Weird Goodbyes” is a song that I would have liked regardless of when, within the year, it had been released, but it happened to come along at the time when I needed it the most.
Structurally based around an unwavering programmed rhythm that the band’s ever impressive drummer Bryce Devendorf slowly piles additional percussive elements on top of, alongside the creaky, mournful upright piano chords from one of The National’s multi-instrumentalists Aaron Dessner, “Weird Goodbyes” precariously walks the line between a simmering sense of self-pitying tension and brief moments of anxious, shimmering release.
Like the best, or at least most successfully executed and thought-provoking songs from The National, it’s the smoldering baritone of the band’s singer and primary lyricist, Matt Berninger, and his still regularly hyper-literate songwriting that makes “Weird Goodbyes” as impactful and personally important as it is.
Berninger, at the time of the song’s release, very briefly described “Weird Goodbyes” as being about “Letting go of the past, moving on, then later being overwhelmed by second thoughts”—and in the way, its written, partially very direct, and partially very fragmented in its use of phrasing and imagery, those sentiments are apparent, yes, but it is in the way the letting go, and the overwhelming nature of second thoughts are depicted that contributes to it being such a resonant song.
I have, within the last year or so specifically, and perhaps even longer if I were to give it a lot of consideration, often find myself thinking about the idea, or the notion, of “fading away,” or at the very least, the figurative distances that can form between individuals. There are layers to that kind of thinking, of course, mostly for myself, but there are layers within the way the act of disappearing is detailed in the song. “Memorize the bathwater, memorize the air,” Berninger begins in his trademark, rumbling voice. “There will come a time I’ll wanna know I was here.”
And it is when Berninger’s efforts at letting go, his emergent second thoughts, and the resulting turmoil within culminate in the chorus of “Weird Goodbyes” that creates the moments, making it as poignant and as emotionally cathartic as it is. The band, still working within the construct of writing accessible tunes, finds a way to make an infectious melody and arrangement that soars and glistens, even while Berninger’s lyrics explore the reticence and melancholy that comes from truly finding a way to let go.
“Move forward now,” he sings, his voice blending with the guest turn by longtime friend and regular collaborator of the band, Justin Vernon. “There’s nothing to do. Can’t turn around—I can’t follow you. Your coat’s in my car—I guess you forgot. It’s crazy the things we let go of.”
“The grief it gets me,” he continues. “The weird goodbyes.”
Sometimes a song is just a song for the person who listens—it can be a song they enjoy, or it can be something they do not connect with for whatever reason. But there are times when a song becomes something much larger and more important than itself, and “Weird Goodbyes” became that for me this year—a way to, along with Berninger, who, as the protagonist, really provides no real resolve for himself, or the listener—unpack the way we choose to say goodbye to one another—the long, awkward, “Minnesota Goodbye,” or something much more direct, and what both of those might mean and how both of those might be perceived by the person on the receiving end.
It provides a way to consider, understand, and eventually (and perhaps reluctantly) find an acceptance in the things we let go of—not because we want to, but because we need to.
Seeing yourself, as I so often see reflections of myself within songs by The National, is rarely “fun”—if anything, it is often unflattering and difficult, but as the band has done countless times in the past, “Weird Goodbyes,” even in its unflattering and difficult nature, explores those feelings with a thoughtful grace and beauty.
Heavy Heart by Bartees Strange
This past year, I thought I was broken…
Watching Bartees Strange’s career over the last two years has been absolutely fascinating—from more or less his introduction through the form of an entire EP of dramatically reimagined and rearranged covers of songs originally performed by The National (released on the label founded by members of The National no less), to his blistering, restless debut Live Forever, his work as a producer and remixer, and slots as the supporting act on high profile tours—all of that work and the seemingly bottomless well of creativity and enthusiasm culminated in inking a deal with the esteemed label 4AD, and the release of his second full length, Farm to Table.
Slowly and gracefully opening with a swirling pattern of twinkling guitar notes, Cox, too, begins singing the first few lines as slowly and gracefully—“There’s reasons for heavy hearts,” he states, before delivering what is one of the most personally impactful lyrics of the year. “This past year, I thought I was broken.”
“Heavy Heart,” like Cox’s own multitudinous nature, is a song that is about myriad things—at its core, it is a meditation on one’s self—how we have arrived at who we are in this moment and perhaps where we want to continue to push ourselves in the future. And I stop short of describing it, or at least parts of it, as being a ‘love song,’ but there is a surprising tenderness and admiration that he arrives at during the chorus—the moment, each time it comes around, that creates an arresting juxtaposition of beauty, jubilation, and a tangible kind of melancholy.
“I never wanna miss you this bad,” Cox explains in the song’s infectious and powerful chorus. “I never wanna run out like that. Sometimes I feel just like my dad—rushing around.”
“Why work so hard if you can’t fall back,” he asks. “Then I remember, I rely too much upon my heavy heart.”
“Heavy Heart” is endlessly impressive in its dynamism, with Cox guiding the song between straightforward, infectious “indie rock” in its chorus, then shifting into a dexterous, breathlessly delivered rapped verse. It’s a poignant and huge statement—one that, even if we, for whatever reason, might consider ourselves to be broken, radiates flashes of hope, or at least optimism, within the reflections we often see of ourselves.
* * *
Aim for My Head by Jacob Banks
Don’t make me lose you and find you in someone else…
Something, at least within recent years, that I have become more aware of when listening to popular music—and, at times, has either taken the fun out of a song, or soured me on an artist, is the presence of toxic masculinity. It can be difficult to go back and listen to a song that, at one time in my life, I enjoyed, but to hear it now through intersectional ears in the year 2022, and understand, much to my disappointment, what is being depicted in the lyrics, makes for often troubling and disappointing realizations.
I heard about Jacob Banks, his third full-length album, Lies About The War, and specifically, the song “Aim for My Head,” the way I have been introduced to a lot of music over the last four years—through the Instagram stories of writer, poet, and podcast host Hanif Abdurraqib, who shared a link to the song shortly after its release in August, and mentioned he had included it on a lengthy playlist of similarly minded songs—often dramatic R&B—titled “The Fellas Are Pleading.”
And there is, of course, an awful lot of pleading that happens during the four minutes when “Aim for My Head” is slowly unfolding.
“Aim for My Head” is not a “breakup” song, but it is a song about a broken heart—or, at least, what happens in the wake of a relationship’s end. However, the song is, as you might anticipate, told from only one point of view—Banks’, where he is the wounded, emotionally devastated protagonist, playing against the off-stage “you” who has done the alleged heartbreaking.
Musically, it is practically impossible to correctly categorize Banks to a genre—perhaps we shouldn’t even try; and on Lies About The War, he practically shifts his sonic aesthetic from song to song. If I were to generalize, or be pressed to describe, I would say he pulls from a soul, and R&B tradition—moments that act as an homage to the impressive and emotionally voiced singers from the 1960s, but that tradition, and the soulfulness, are then run through current filters to create something that, at times, is quite literally otherworldly. In “Aim for My Head,” it seems like his singing from another plane, or dimension, but the pleading, and just the absolutely visceral sense of sorrow, urgency, and desperation, travel the distance from this other place with beauty and ease.
At first, the structural arrangement of “Aim for My Head” is relatively sparse—something that lends itself to amplifying the emotional heights Banks takes the song to once he finds his way into it. There is no hesitation, on his part—no, not exactly, but it does take a moment for his voice to really settle into the gentle and hypnotic pulls of the electric guitar underneath him—mostly clean in tone, with just a little hint of an effected crunch.
Banks, as a vocalist, is in no need of any kind of production effects or assistance to hit the notes he needs to, or make his voice soar as high as he lets it, but like so many contemporary singers, Banks winds up employing the use of studio tricks and Auto-Tune software to create a cold, muffled, and warbled sensation on his voice, which isn’t distracting exactly from “Aim for My Head,” but it does remove a kind of genuinely human quality that I think the song is capable of having, and exploring, if he were to sing it without something weighing it down slightly.
“Aim for My Head” begins with a request, or rather, a plea: “Go easy on me, darling,” Banks implores in the opening line. “Don’t aim for my head,” and as the song continues, and Banks builds this narrative, he oscillates back and forth between two different types of anguish, where there is a little bit of overlap between each extreme—one is rooted firmly in a sadness from this broken heart, the other from a place of resentment that borders on anger, or at the very least, spite.
“Don’t colour me red,” he continues, before the pleading starts taking a stark turn. “What more can I give? Take from my lips. I’ll beg, and I’ll bleed,” he assures this person. “Just take what you need.”
This kind of pleading, or imploring, then effortlessly, and rather quickly, into that place of resentment, and spite. “Don’t make me lose you and find you off the ledge,” Banks sings in a line that, as it should, creates a sense of discomfort. “Don’t make me lose you and find you in someone else,” he continues. “Yes, it’s your skin, it’s your bones—but it’s my home.”
And I think that, upon my earliest listens of “Aim for My Head,” the fragile ‘male ego’ that Banks depicts with the lines “Don’t make me lose you and find you in someone else” registered. It wasn’t harmless—no, not at all, but I didn’t see it as totally harmful, but it was many listens later when I realized the weight, and implications, in the lines that follow—“It’s your skin, it’s your bones—but it’s my home,” and the way he delivers them with a dejected tenderness, filling the space that forms when anguish moves from a broken heart to a spiteful one.
The toxicity, as depicted in “Aim for My Head,” is difficult to hear, and that’s the point, I think—or at least it is a point that is made, indirect of the “I’m a man with a broken heart” narrative Banks has written for himself. The lyrics, good, bad, ugly, whatever you want to call them, it’s the way he sells them, and the soulful hurt in his voice, that makes this as impactful as it is, as well as the unexpected moment of catharsis at the end. With a literal minute left of the song, there is an enormous, surprising swell, as Banks reaches down further into his vocal prowess than he has up until this point, and begins absolutely carrying, and belting the ever living fuck out of the words, “Oh, hey lover,” as the song itself is swallowed by an oppressive, startling, and sustained synthesizer blast—disorienting, and out of character for the tone of the song up until that point. It’s effective, though, pulling you out of the gentle, albeit uncomfortable, world that Banks has been longing from.
As suddenly as this torrent and drone of synthesizer arrive, it disperses, and “Aim for My Head” resolves itself with Banks pleading one more time, “Don’t aim for my head.” It’s the kind of song that is so arresting, it knocks the wind out of you the first time you hear it—a beautiful presentation of an absolutely hideous sentiment.
Anywhere With You by Maggie Rogers
If I’m gonna lose my mind, I’m gonna lose it with you…
Perhaps it began last year, but certainly this year, I found myself thinking about, and then writing about, the idea of a convergence, or an intersection, of when two or more things begin to collide into one another slowly, and my fascination with this was the chance to explore what forms in the space between.
There is an impressive run of five songs in a row in Surrender’s first half that tracks this desire for and of surrender and an attempt to find the right balance of release and tension, but even more impressive is the way she discovers that balance and manages to work with it—the towering highs and the pensive lows, within just one song.
“Anywhere With You” is, inherently, a love song, but it is also where the idea of a love song converges with an unhinged desperation and a visceral urgency.
And there are myriad examples on Surrender of where Rogers takes a song’s arranging to towering heights—even the opening track, “Overdrive,” soars to surprisingly high, triumphant places, before she continues to build off of that with the bombastic and sexually charged one-two of “That’s Where I Am” and “Want Want.” “Anywhere With You,” at least in how it begins, seems like the point in the album where she has considered scaling things back, but the further you get into the song, it becomes evident that is simply not the case.
“Anywhere With You” opens with a rippling, pensive series of piano chords, while several atmospheric elements swirl around it, and it’s within this place of reserve that Rogers begins to craft a rather personal narrative—the writing on Surrender is quite personal and reflective overall, but it is here where she works to create a very vivid portrait of a specific moment in time, and the feelings that are tumbling around within it. It’s a moment, from the beginning all the way until the song’s final gasps, where the music, specifically how it continues to build until the point where it cannot be held back any longer, amplifies the urgency, and at times the danger within Rogers’ evocative lyricism.
Within the narrative of “Anywhere With You,” Rogers wastes no time with exposition, and drops the listeners right into a scene where anger quickly turns into concern, and then ultimately compassion, and then we, along with her, and the unnamed “you” she is singing of, are off and running, rarely if ever stopping to catch a collective breath until the song careens into its conclusion. And it is the moment when both concern and compassion are depicted in what has been deemed the chorus that, upon my initial listen, was the first indication that “Anywhere With You” was going to be among the most emotionally resonant songs on Surrender.
“‘Listen, I know it’s been a long, long year,’” Rogers sings with a genuine tenderness to her voice as the chorus begins. “‘But I think we should go and get you out of here.’ I’ll go anywhere—anywhere with you,” she continues. “Pack up all your shit and put it in the back,” then, with perhaps a little less tenderness, “Maybe the miles can make up for the things you lack.”
The dynamic between Rogers and the unnamed individual within the song can be best described as a whirlwind—chaotic, perhaps volatile, and even in the sense of danger and desperation that she hints at in the narrative, there is something terribly exciting and electrifying to how it unfolds. “You tell me that forever couldn’t come too soon,” she implores when the song reaches its second chorus. “I wanna lose my mind in a hotel room with you—anywhere will do.” The layers to the song’s instrumentation, too, continue to grow as it all reaches toward a cacophonic peak, with thundering percussion, a chugging bass line, and searing electric guitars all dumped into the dizzying swirl.
And there is a kind of extended release and catharsis the further Rogers pushes “Anywhere With You,” where she forces the song beyond a logical breaking point within the song’s bridge and final chorus, before there is nothing left to do but to let the elements spiral to the end. The sense of urgency to this relationship becomes the most intense and turbulent when she breathlessly shouts questions that receive no responses from the “you” within the narrative—“Would you tell me if I ever started holding you back?,” Rogers implores. “Would you talk me off the guard rail of my panic attack?”
As “Anywhere With You” is on the cusp of its final few moments, and the song’s intensity is on the verge of being released into the ether, the sincerity of Rogers’ desire culminates in a last plea: “If I’m gonna lost my mind I’m gonna lose it with you. You tell me you want everything—you want it fast, but all I’ve ever wanted is to make something fucking last.” Reaching soaring heights after both beginnings, and then ending, in places of such quiet contemplation, “Anywhere With You” goes above and beyond in the powerful, uncomfortable way t portrays how love and lust are often confused for one another, and how desires lead you into moments of surrender to something larger than yourself.
Coolest Fucking Bitch in Town by Haley Blais
Am I just a hypocrite, or is there something wrong with it—I want my therapist to think I’m cool…
It has come and gone off of her website for a majority of the year, and even if it were available, and available in my size, when I would look for it, I am uncertain where, or for what occasion, it would be appropriate to wear a t-shirt that has the phrase “Coolest Fucking Bitch in Town” written on it.
And before the algorithm presented the song “Coolest Fucking Bitch in Town” to me on Spotify shortly after its release in the spring, I had no idea who Haley Blais was—and honestly, I still do not know a lot about her—and even with how much I loved this song from before my first listen was even over, I have not, and I am uncertain why, gone back to explore her catalog.
From Vancouver, Blais has been self-releasing music on the internet for roughly eight years—after an EP in 2018, she released her first full-length, Below The Salt, in 2020, but like a number of other younger, up-and-coming artists, Blais seems to have amassed her following, at least at first, through content on YouTube.
“Coolest Fucking Bitch,” a stand-alone single that is presumably slated for inclusion on a forthcoming full-length LP, musically, operates from within an intentionally slow burn. It swirls, often beautifully so, through the glistening electric guitar riff that noodles its way into the song after the first verse, and structurally, it occasionally meanders, but Blais refuses to let the song’s arranging get away from her—maintaining a very specific kind of simmering tension throughout almost the entire song.
Even as the song reaches its crescendo, with the arrival of the additional, and at times surprising elements (the inclusion of the horns, specifically) to the song’s instrumentation is seemingly pointing it the direction of some kind of cacophony, or that it’s going to blast off—it never does, but rather, heads downward, finding a somewhat abrupt, but fitting, resolution.
“Coolest Fucking Bitch”’s arranging is gentle and fascinating in its brooding and almost melancholic nature, but it is genuinely Blais’ lyricism in the song that makes it as compelling and haunting as it is—intelligent enough to engage in the ideas of growing up, growing older, and exploring mental health, but written with a scathing, dark sense of humor to do it all with a knowing wink, and smirk, at the listener.
Blais’ writing in “Coolest Fucking Bitch” is both intentionally vague, or fragmented in the narrative that she’s crafting, while still being personal and reflective, and extremely vivid in its depictions. The song, built around Blais’ observations as the narrator, doesn’t exactly detail the dissolution of a friendship, but rather the changes two people go through—internally but also interpersonally, as they navigate the difficulties of entering into adulthood, and there is very terrible, visceral sense of sadness to it all that makes it essential listening.
In the first verse, Blais tries, and struggles, to find the right words to comfort a friend whose mother is remarrying—“And I don’t know what to tell you to make you not feel sad, so I offer my condolences to dad.” But it is in the second, and then final verses, where Blais turns the song’s writing inward, doing so in a way that acknowledges the unflattering traits we all develop, and maintains a biting, self-effacing edge to these observations. “Am I just a hypocrite, or is there something wrong with it,” she asks pointedly before making the song’s most surprising and memorable line. “I want my therapist to think I’m cool.”
Within Blais exploration of becoming a certain age—presumably entering into your early 20s, the thing that is underlying in “Coolest Fucking Bitch in Town” is a sense of confinement, a want, or yearning for something more that you might not yet deserve, and with all of that, a real sense of sadness. You can hear it in the stark observations from the third verse—“Can I be responsible for things that I did years ago,” Blais asks. “I guess it could be good for just a laugh. Is it just a privileged though—I ask you once, but I forgot I’m not the only one that’s split in half.”
And it is a resentment from that feeling of confinement—of, perhaps, still living in the town where you grew up, despite your best efforts, that comes through in the way Blais’ plays with both humor and pathos in the instantly iconic chorus: “So if you see me out,” she declares. “Know that I’m the coolest fucking bitch in town,” before following that up with one of the song’s more somber statements, loaded with an uneasy, lonely, and kind of desperate sentiment: “You want a drink that’s watered down—it’ll just take you longer.”
There is a difference, albeit a fine line, between wanting to be better than you are, and there is thinking you are better than you are, and there is no right or wrong answer on either side, and in “Coolest Fucking Bitch in Town,” Blais isn’t exactly looking for an answer—there is no actual resolution as the song begins tumbling toward its conclusion, but with all that still lingers within this narrative, both for the attempted, perhaps half-hearted self-reflection she does, as well as whatever glimpses of ourselves we may catch within this exploration, she carries it with a thoughtful grace that remains compelling with each listen.
Free in The Knowledge by The Smile
If this is just a bad moment…
It was, and still is, difficult not to draw direct comparisons between Radiohead, and the recently founded project The Smile.
Maybe that is not the case at all, but with the inclusion of Radiohead’s multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood, The Smile’s debut, as often as it could be surprising, or in the moments when it played against type, there were often undeniable musical echoes of Yorke’s and Greenwood’s day job throughout, and it was, perhaps unintentionally so, a challenge not to see the humor in this perceived dedication to avoidance.
Sequenced midway through the album’s second half, “Free in The Knowledge” is one of the band’s slower, more smoldering songs—it opens with an eerie, creeping atmospheric sound that is similar to something Radiohead could, and most certainly has, crafted in the past, but that is where the comparisons, at least for me, come to an end. Structured primarily around Yorke’s acoustic guitar strumming, where the chords effortlessly shift between melancholic, then ones that border on sounding oddly hopeful, there is a real sense of swirling, ruminating drama that courses throughout, thanks mainly to Greenwood’s string arrangement, which creates a sweeping theatricality that Radiohead have reached at times in the past, of course, but do not make use of that often.
I was tempted to say that Yorke, as a lyricist, over the last 30 years, has grown out of the sneering deprecation and alienation of lines like, “I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here,” but he hasn’t—not really. Not grown “out” of them, but has grown up, and aged into a much more pensive and poignant way of borderline self-effacing assessment, which is where he is writing from on “Free in The Knowledge.”
In the past, at least with Radiohead’s output over the last 20 years for sure, Yorke’s lyricism has, famously, become much more abstract, and that is often the point. A song might, in fact, be about something specific, but it is dressed up with enough fragmented, often cold, and bizarre ambiguity that it is open-ended for the listener to get what they want out of it. Where Radiohead, and even Yorke’s solo canon, and his writing with The Smile differ is that many of the songs featured on A Light for Attracting Attention are much more direct—I didn’t say literal. And maybe it is because there are fewer sonic complexities and dense layerings occurring within the songs themselves, but it is the first time, in a long time, that Yorke’s lyrics have appeared much more humanistic, or easier to approach, and “Free in The Knowledge” is among the songs where the writing is personally identifiable and resonant.
“Free in The Knowledge” is a stark reflection—on mortality, sure, within the song’s opening lines: “Free, in the knowledge, that one day, this will end,” but the true starkness of the song comes when Yorke is quite literally faced to face with himself—still a creep and a weirdo, he isn’t asking himself what the hell he’s doing here, but rather, how the hell are we going to continue muddling through the often hellish existence that is the human condition.
“I talk to the face in the mirror, but he can’t get through,” Yorke sings in a higher register—his voice, still incredible, albeit a little weathered from the passage of time. “Turns out we’re in this together—both me and you.”
Musically, throughout A Light for Attracting Attention, The Smile can be virtuosic at times, both through the impressive dexterity of Jonny Greenwood’s work on the guitar, but also with jazz drummer Tom Skinner behind the kit—but there is a natural restraint (and you can hear it on how deliberate the playing is) on “Free in The Knowledge,” with Skinner’s steady rhythm keeping coming in during the song’s final minute, and the lush string arranging and slow-moving atmospherics crafting a bed with which Yorke and the acoustic guitar float above.
There is one line, removed from its total context, that I have returned to often since both “Free in The Knowledge” was released as an advance single from the album, as well as since A Light for Attracting Attentions was issued in the late spring—“If this is just a bad moment.” The way Yorke sings it is fascinating to me, in how he pulls and stretches one-syllable words (like “this”) to last longer in the way he is letting everything tumble out of him, but it is the idea itself of a bad moment that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about, and what it means.
What it means in a larger sense, sure, like are we, as a world, just in a bad moment, that will hopefully pass, but what it means in a much more personal sense, like my own bad moments—the moments where my depression, already severe, becomes more detrimental, or when, perhaps because of that, I misbehave, or poorly around those whom I love.
“If this is just a bad moment,” York howls with a sadness in his voice. “And we are fumbling around,” he continues—“Free in The Knowledge” is a haunting, beautiful, and difficult portrait of this fumbling within our own bad moments where there are no easy answers on what to do next.
Fugazi by Babehoven
An idea would leave me breathless…
Objectively, you could view 2022 as a banner year for the duo Babehoven, specifically looking at where they were in January, and where they have come as the year winds to a close. Following a series of self-released EPs via their Bandcamp page, Maya Bon and Ryan Alpert connected with the esteemed independent label Double Double Whammy to release their debut full-length, Light Moving Time, in October, as well as a five-song EP, Sunk, in the spring—an opportunity that introduced the project to a much larger audience that might have previously been unfamiliar with their work.
Within that restlessness and growth, there are things that Babehoven does well—like leaning into a spiraling disorienting feeling, or dissonance within a song; and then there are things that the band does exceptionally well, like tapping into this kind of post-Mazzy Star haze—deliberately slow-moving, borderline ethereal, and extraordinarily dreamy in how the song sounds, but more importantly, and perhaps most impressively, how the song feels.
That sound, and that feeling—hazy, ethereal, and dreamy—was my, and perhaps yours as well, introduction to Babehoven, through the woozy, stumbling opening track off of the Sunk EP, “Fugazi.”
Musically, “Fugazi” feels like falling, in slow motion, from a towering height—it will take you all of four and a half minutes to make your way to the bottom, but the pacing of the song is so deliberate that you cannot help but allow the woozy and swooning sensation take over completely. With a low, rumbling bass line that surges through just how tightly woven the rest of the instrumentation is, a dusty-sounding keyboard melody that twinkles through within the second verse, and snarling, fuzzy atmospheric sound that ripples through the chorus, the structure to “Fugazi” is fascinating, and undeniably hypnotic, because of the precision of both the gentle, sharp sounding strums of the acoustic guitar, and the unwavering rhythm of the muffled, brushed drum kit—the silences falling in between cymbal taps and snare hits creating a silence that is used like another instrument within the song’s arrangement.
The music, yes, is hazy and swooning, but so is Maya Bon’s vocal delivery—a little quiet and a little mumbled in how she sings the verses, it’s within the song’s chorus—two lines, repeated, “An idea will leave me breathless. An idea, you leave me breathless, where her voice begins to soar just enough to allow the pleading and bittersweet nature of “Fugazi” to rise to the surface before she pulls it all back down again.
Bon can, and often does, walk a line between being extremely confessional or personal within her songwriting, while still keeping things cloaked in a layer of ambiguity. Regardless of how vague or direct “Fugazi” is, there is something terribly somber about some of the phrasing that Bon creates, and something heartbreaking about how many of these lines are delivered. “Face is a mess—I’m wondering how what happens when we’re young doesn’t seem to work out,” she asks in the second verse, and never receives an answer.
Of Babehoven’s canonical works in 2022 alone, “Fugazi” is not the most confessional or personal Bon has been with her writing, but it is a song that is so entrancing, you, or at least I, never really want it to end. The delicate rising and falling and the unrelenting though hushed rhythm creates an environment that never really wants to let go of you—harrowing in the way the band has made something so beautiful and somber, and haunting for the very same reasons.
Gemini by Shan
Seen my darkness turn me into light…
Following the release of Shan’s Palomino during the summer, my friend Alyssa pointed out to me, after she read my review of the album, that even within a record that often sounds smooth, jubilant, and enthusiastic in its arranging, I still, unable to honestly play against type, bestowed my highest praises to the track that sounds the most restrained and melancholic of the bunch.
The songs from Palomino are often celebratory—and much of the album’s instrumentation and song structure is an ode to the slinky, groove-ladened R&B sounds that are indicative of the mid to late 1990s. The album’s closing track, “Gemini,” is lyrically just as celebratory, if not more so, than any other moment on the album, where Poo, rather than crooning about the usual R&B tropes (pining for a love that hasn’t happened yet, or pining for a love that is long since over), he is earnestly singing about the love he finds himself within the present moment, and why it matters so much to him.
“I can take vacation in your eyes,” Poo says in “Gemini”’s opening line. “Cool me down like white wine over ice,” he continues, as he effortlessly guides the song through an exuberant build-up right before it gracefully slides into the shimmering though subdued chorus.
And therein lies the magic within the song—the way all of these elements tumble together—gently and perfectly, to create a spectacular moment in time. Poo’s earnestness could, in the hands of a much less confident singer, appear cloying, but he sings lines like, “Read me like the way you read my palm—you’re my queen, you know that,” with such sincerity and conviction, that they are never at risk of sounding overly saccharine.
Musically, the rhythm track to “Gemini,” is one of the more lush sounding on Palomino, and it remains steady, quietly literally, through the roughly four minutes of the song. Assisted by a jazzy, glistening electric guitar progression, a thick, rolling bassline, and some very tasteful and subtle turntable scratches, the actual arrangement of the song itself, much like the beat behind it all, remains surprisingly even—with no huge build-up, or moments where it swells, it is up to Poo in a sense to create that kind of sensations with just his vocals, and how he delivers them, like the sudden sense of urgency that comes in the “pre-chorus,” where the words begin to tumble out of him with just a little more speed, or the higher, airy range he hits when he reaches the chorus, where, if you were looking for some kind of conceit for the song. Perhaps for a majority of the writing on Palomino, you’ll find it in the line, “My life was wrong before you came around.”
The love song can be difficult to do well, or with any kind of grace. There is a quiet nature, albeit extreme in just how sincere it all is, that Poo demonstrates on “Gemini,” crafting an infectious song that is both full of heart at the same time it beckons you to the dance floor to move to its inescapable rhythm.
Maroon by Taylor Swift
That’s a real fucking legacy to leave…
In the time between my first listen to Midnights, at 11 p.m. on Thursday, October 20th, when I began writing my reflection on the album, and when I completed it (it took a lot less time than I was anticipating, honestly, and I also used perhaps more words than I should have), my opinion changed on polarizing line in “Anti-Hero”—the one about everybody being a “sexy baby.” And while the self-deprecation in “Anti-Hero” is among what resonated the most with me on a personal level after sitting with the album for so long, and the visceral catharsis and anguish of “Would’ve, Should’ve, Could’ve” was perhaps the most impactful overall in a sorrowful, haunting kind of way, Midnights’ second track, “Maroon,” was, and still is, among the album’s most surprising simply in how it unfolds, how vivid its depictions are, and how the palpable sense of longing and loss that Swift creates lingers long after the album is over.
Lyrically, Swift (allegedly) revisits the day, so her whirlwind courtship with Harry Styles, and constructs vivid portraits of an urgent, all-encompassing lust and infatuation from the beginning stages of a relationship when everything feels new and like the possibilities are endless, before shifting the narrative into the relationship’s waning moments within the mournful second verse—“When the silence came we were shaking, blind and hazy,” Swift reflects. “How the hell did we lose sight of us again?,” she asks, following it with one of the most lasting images from the entirety of the album: “You were standing hollow-eyed in the hallway; carnations you thought were roses—that’s us.”
As much as a song like “Maroon,” in how ominous it is in its orchestration, can still sound iridescent and shimmery when Swift and Antonoff pull it out from the depths and let it soar in the chorus, where Swift walks the line between the beginning and the end of the relationship—“I lost you—the one I was dancing with in New York, with no shoes,” she sings with a wistfulness; then, just a few lines later, “The rust that grew between telephones, the lips I used to call home—so scarlet, it was maroon.”
Swift, as a songwriter, is known for her bridges, and while I had not initially thought of what I felt is the most memorable moment on “Maroon,” as a bridge, it is indicated as so on Genius—delivered right before the final instance of the chorus, Swift, with her voice layered through an eerie, partially reversed effect, shares a last gasp both remorse and regret over the demise of this relationship, and the hold it still has on her, for better or for worse: “I wake with your memory over me—that’s a real fucking legacy to leave.”
Evocative in its narrative, fascinating and daring in the way the music slithers and pulsates, with Swift playing into the creeping, chilling aesthetic of the song, “Maroon” is a stirring and stark look at how we, no matter how far we may think we have removed ourselves from them, are never really able to hold back the floodgates of our memories from the past.
New Job by Bats
Why can’t we just go to the mall and get our old jobs back, and work across the hall from each other?
And what I found, eventually, over the course of the five years and change I worked at the same place, was that there are the people you wind up forming workplace friendships with—they are, perhaps, the kind of people you are glad to see during your day, and that you have a fun time talking with, or joking around with, while the both of you are stuck within the confines of your shared place of work, but that’s where the friendship more or less ends. For whatever reason, it is not the kind of dynamic, or they are not the kind of person you carry with into your life outside of your place of employment. They are simply just your friend from work.
What happens when your “friend from work” becomes a close friend outside of that—what kind of relationship do you have with this person when you see each other, perhaps regularly, in a different setting? And what, if anything, does the kind of shift, or change in your relationship do to the dynamic you have within the workplace?
What happens when one of you decides that it is time to leave, eventually taking a different job? What happens when both move on—and the thing that brought you into each other’s lives becomes something in the past—part of a story that perhaps neither of you want to tell anymore.
How difficult does it become to maintain the friendship, and still feel like you are as close as you once were?
It’s something that I have thought about often over the last year, since leaving the job I held for so many—how I have, and have not, tried to maintain connections, and how the relationships I have, perhaps, put more effort into sustaining have shifted.
“It is really never the same when you aren’t spending all day together,” my friend Alyssa explains to me when I ask her about her own experiences with how friendships with co-workers have shifted once they no longer work together.
And it is these sentiments that I found within the song “New Job,” from Jess Awh’s project Bats—sentiments that I returned to the most throughout the year: the terrible, bittersweet place that it comes from—the want for something that realistically just no longer possible, then the overwhelming melancholy that creeps in when you resign yourself to that.
Bats was initially conceived as a solo outing for Awh, but during the recording of Blue Cabinet, it evolved into a collaborative band through the inclusion of additional players; the second full-length she’s released under the moniker, sonically it is much more robust and focused in comparison to the earlier Bats material, but still operates from the sonic space that forms within the overlapping edges of idiosyncratic, ramshackle indie rock, and Western tinged, twangy folk.
Both of those influences, or aesthetics, come through in “New Job”—the strummed electric guitar and the way the drum track has been engineered, leans into the kind of gentle, DIY indie-rock of it all, and the slight twang in Awh’s pleading within her vocal delivery enhances the folksy nature of the project, and of her upbringing in Nashville.
“We need to take it back in time,” Awh asks in a quiet voice within the opening moments of “New Job.” “I cannot be the voice you hear when you’re not listening,” she continues, and in both verses, becomes extremely nostalgic, getting lost in moments with the off-stage “you” of this song—moments, but more importantly, sentiments, neither of which will happen again.
And when a friend from work—regardless of if they have crossed that line to become a friend outside of work as well—leaves, you want to be happy for them, or excited for whatever opportunity they are taking, but there is often selfishness that can be difficult to keep from them. “You’ve got a new job, and it’s important,” Awh sings in the chorus, perhaps trying to downplay the hurt, and sadness, that come with such a change. “You’ve got responsibilities you can’t ignore. You’ve got the world coming down on your shoulders—you got a new job.”
Awh’s wistfulness takes an even more somber turn within the second verse, where there are slight hints of desperation in her lyricism” “Why can’t we just go to the mall and get our old jobs back,” she asks. “And work across the hall from each other.”
There is no resolve as “New Job” tumbles to its conclusion—we, as the listener, never hear a response, or an answer, from Awh’s friend from work—and this is, perhaps, the most difficult thing to realize within a song that is rather thoughtful and surprisingly infectious in a very restrained kind of way, using a quiet, delicate grace to navigate the complicated, recognizable feelings.
Snake by Sadurn
…You know that I’m not as true as I thought, but I’d still drive for several hours on a dime if you dropped it.
Within the way the opening lines of “Snake” are more or less whispered just above the fragile and pensive strumming of an electric guitar, there was, and most certainly still is, something to behold about how the song doesn’t just ask for your attention, it demands it—building a moment, out of nowhere, that just stops you right in your tracks because you know something is about to happen. It doesn’t have to be an enormous something, or some kind of emotionally cathartic something, but there is a feeling of anticipation and suspense as Sadurn’s singer and lyricist Genevieve DeGroot almost fumbles their fingers around on the guitar strings, opening things up for the rest of the band to make their way into song’s environment.
DeGroot’s lyricism, as well as the way those lyrics are delivered, have a sprawling, poetic nature to them—not exactly stream of consciousness in how they arrive, they do quite literally tumble out within to the arranging of “Snake,” and are sung with a confidence that allows them to sound natural in where they land—at times, landing with precision, and elsewhere, spoken with a breathless, pleading urgency that raises the stakes of the song.
Throughout “Snake,” DeGroot is addressing an off-stage ‘you’—stopping short of being the song’s antagonist, they are a former romantic partner, with DeGroot themselves attempting to make sense of what is depicted as a tumultuous, often confusing relationship. There is no clear chorus in the song, but the song's arrangement is constructed around a melody that, over time, builds to specific heights before it is brought back in, allowing DeGroot to let the narrative unfold over the top of it all. Without a chorus to return to, there are points of familiarity that the band returns to, most noticeably in the opening line of each verse—“Honey, I was wrong,” DeGroot whispers as a confession when the song begins, later changing it to “Honey, I was right,” “Honey, I would bet,” and “Honey, you were kind.”
The self-aware observations in “Snake,” and elsewhere on Radiator are difficult, but in that difficulty, you can hear DeGroot’s attempts at compassion and growth—“Honey, I was wrong. I had to walk down to turn, get a good look at my ways and, hell, maybe I’ve learned something from wringing out my shame,” they admit, then later as the song spirals to its conclusion, “Honey you were kind to tell me that it’s alright—I know my fault is that I speak every dam thought in my mind.”
A song like “Snake,” moving at not exactly a glacial pace, but is very measured in how it ebbs and flows, with the crisp, thick-sounding percussion, slow rolling bass reverberations, and the interplay between DeGroot’s rhythm guitar and John Cox’s lead, is surprisingly infectious, walking the lines where gentle and sometimes twangy folk music intersect with a ramshackle, guitar-focused “indie rock,” reminiscent of early Land of Talk. A musically reserved though personally bold exploration, “Snake” is easily one of the most poignant songs of the year.
Surrender My Heart by Carly Rae Jepsen
I’m sorry if I push your good away…
As a songwriter and performer, there are a lot of things that Carly Rae Jepsen can do extremely well, and one of those is her capabilities at writing the hell out of an opening track—on par with the iconic bombast of “Run Away With Me,” pulled from her classic 2015 effort Emotion, the kaleidoscopic, urgent, and dazzling heights of the unfortunately titled “This Love Isn’t Crazy,” from the b-side compendium to Dedicated, and the smoldering sense of bittersweet regret on the mid-tempo slink of “Julien,” on 2019’s Dedicated, the first song on Jepsen’s long awaited The Loneliest Time, “Surrender My Heart” does so much within such a short amount of time, striking the proper balance of tension and release as it is propelled in ways that glisten and ways that soar to astonishingly towering places.
The song’s most surprising instance of confessional honesty comes within the first verse—“I paid to toughen up in therapy,” Jepsen explains as the song is just getting underway. “She said to me, ‘Soften up.’” Then, just a few lines later, “I know you hate it I still test your love—I’m trying not to fuck this up”—the one utterance of profanity to be found on the album, and apparently enough to earn The Loneliest Time a Parental Advisory warning label on its cover art.
Jepsen, often writing about the various stages of love, and often writing from a place of longing, or desire—regularly the longing and desire for another person—turns that desire inward with her wants for this relationship as “Surrender My Heart” begins its slow, dramatic build towards the chorus. “I want to be brave enough to show you, my not-so-perfect family,” she exclaims, before the audacious statement, “I wanna be brave enough for everything.”
Produced by Imad-Roy-El-Amine and Max Hershenow,, “Surrender My Heart,” begins as a quiet, reserved ripple of keyboards before the 80s-inspired blasts of heavy synthesizers and electronic drums make their way in, building the song up higher and higher until it explodes in blinding Technicolor. And within pop music—specifically, the kind of pop music that Jepsen writes, as she did on “Run Away With Me,” “Surrender My Heart” is, as one might anticipate, built around an enormous, shout-a-long chorus. There is a short, but very intentional pause between the verse, before the music suddenly swells, and the song itself goes into overdrive, creating, as only Jespen is capable of doing, a moment of pure pop perfection, as she takes a huge breath and bellows, “Surrender my heart—I’m out here in the open!”
Jepsen, in her lyricism, often writes from specific extremes, or corners, of the idea of a “love song”—the heartbreak and sorrow that arrive when a relationship has come to an end, or the pining that comes before love, or even romance, has even really begun. I would never say her writing has ever come from a place of “hopelessness,” but something she rarely does, and in a sense, creates a challenge for her, is writing from the hope that be found within the relationship as it is happening—well after it has started but before the tumultuous end.
“I wanna be honest with you,” Jepsen assures in the final line of the chorus of “Surrender My Heart,” and for as bold of a musical declaration as the song is, it’s equally, if not more so, of a bold and thoughtful declaration of the effort that needs to go into a relationship to make it work—a song written from being on the cusp, but still filled with a sense of uncertainty at the moment when the heart is surrendered.
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