To be weirdly specific, this song feels like some soundtrack at the end of a moody atmospheric college dormroom coming of age novel or indie queer romance movie. A ballad of esoteric lyrics, strange characters and stream of consciousness continuity, this song conjures the feeling of an overexposed polaroid of a bloody-kneed girl on her skateboard at night. She’s in the graveyard, denied her first kiss, and is ready to walk all these pesky feelings back, though in her reeling thoughts she can’t quite manage it. And isn’t that a whole mood?
What I love about it is how off-kilter it is, it’s lyrics from the first line “ just to start this off, \ this isn’t the start of anything.” That self-contradiction sustains with the titular presumably Dead Arm coming back to life and a refrain of “honey you are nothing to me / i don’t call people anything / that’s thought to be so sweet”
It’s a love song that refuses to call itself one, a reeling mind in the silence post-confession.
In a collection of quips that zip along from lyric to lyric, it captures the comically horrifying and cosmically mundane moments of rejection, peaking into a racing mind connecting images. The denials and rejections of a constellation of encounters with oddball characters reminds me of me of the weirdness of twilight college experiences: the old man without a watch, roller-skating toddlers, the chick high in corner three, dumb lost boys, pretend spouses and personified business causal khakis, and of course the uber driver — all highlighting the unique, drug-fueled transience that is getting your degree and finding who you are alongside other lost 20somethings that wanna find someone to cling to, someone for whom you will undergo the mortifying ordeal of being known.
“I wanna know your passwords/ Without changing them in preferences/ and all the childhood streets and deceased pets that they’re referencing”
The song builds in that youthful yearning and heartbreak until it breaks and spills over to yearning for anyone, please, and seeing the beauty of everything as someone apart form it:
“cause i’m in love with strangers who I’ve never even seen
and weird cut bangs and sweaters swaying kind of awkwardly
i’m in love with fresh air friends from overheated houses
till I uber up a giant park and dump my body in my dorm bed”
These college aesthetics, the awkwardness of others like you delivers so much of the wanting.
Then where “speech starts coming back” it’s like the rush of all these thoughts and remembrances in reaction to the moment of rejection, are coming apart in her stunned silence. Here, the fear that’s driving it all can be named: a fear of a settled future that snuck up in the rush of possibility.
“and all these pretend spouses are a happy storybook,
that’ll turn to stark nonfiction in the time it took
for me to notice that I’m old, which means I’ll be 30 and happy
likely married to personified business casual khakis”
That idea of growing up to get exactly what you wanted horrifying you because you know you’re supposed to be happy and at the same time, you’re certain you can’t be. That you’re missing out, and that fantasy-becoming-reality can’t hold up because reality is something that sucks. And wondering all of that in your dormroom, class in the morning, the weight of your whole future laid out before you crushing you enough to take any escape route not to think about it.
I think my favourite line is the “and i’ll forget about it when i wake up late and stupid / i tried to tell the uber driver till he tried to hit it”
because she tries to treat all that fear as if it was all a bad dream, but also tries to confess that fear to a stranger, to get it out, only to face a complete disengage and disinterest from anything she says as this gross person continues to want something from you, but not you. It’s another rejection of vulnerability, honesty and self, and a confirmation of that fear.
And the resulting repulsion from another rejection throws us back to that first image, of being denied a first kiss, the stunned silence in response, the million thoughts that burst in that moment of hurt, the moment of the rejection of your vulnerability, before the final protective reactive refrain
“honey you are nothing to me i don’t call people anything that's thought to be so sweet”
And all of that rush settling into speech. Because when you can’t say it you sing it, until that’s enough of that. Anyway, this song makes me wanna hope to find love again I guess.
