109. The Week in Me
109. The Week in Me
Annotations on "Abbey, I'm Sorry I Stole Your Man."
Shalom!
I decided to break down one of my released songs for you today, so you can go listen to it once you’ve read the lyrics and learned some secrets and clues from the lyrics.
I was once a singer-songwriter, a terrible singer and a fastidious songwriter, which is to say I wrote about 40 songs while sitting criss-cross atop my toilet seat at 3am during the Panny DeVito. I retired because I have a terrible voice and do not know how to produce it and if I wanted to sit in a room and frustratedly explain to pedantic men how to understand my heart and produce its best results, I’d rather try my luck getting laid, and not pay 500 dollars for a mix that muddied the live drums I paid extra for into chorus gazpacho. I am the happiest retired person ever.
“Abbey, I’m Sorry I Stole Your Man” is my most streamed song, which thrills me not because it’s my favorite (it is the one I hear the opening second of and flail into my Apple Music app to hit NEXT on if it ever emerges in an algorithmic playlist). I can actually hear my then-need of a bilateral turbinate reduction and sinusitis corrective surgery that would come about two months after I recorded it in my producer’s pale wood armoire on the Upper East. I delight in its streaming legacy because it allows me to “hold on hope” that it will make its way into the ears of a superior singer who will like Whitney Houston to Dolly Parton, release a gorgina cover and make me a yachtload of residual cash. My secret wish, what my dying wish would be, is that that superior singer is Kelly Clarkson. My left nut for Kelly to sing this song for Kellyoke. Dolly Parton herself duetting would be icing.
The song is a sequel to “Jolene,” from Jolene’s perspective. This approach has been chronicled in song before, but I did not know that going in and thought I really had something original. I am not too disheartened by my unoriginality, however, because I mirrored one of my songwriting icons Kirsty MacColl, whose “Caroline” names the protagonist and wails to her with shame - just not as much as my Jolene does.
This song began as a mistress’s lament, an exploration of the “how you get ‘em is how you lose ‘em” bromide. As it unfurled across my Google doc, I realized I had an opportunity to perform a lyrical seance, and expand a fabled character who I felt deserved an opportunity to atone. It was critical to me that she atone: imperfectly, with some justification, but truly sorry - one who, if she can unbind the shackles of the Austenian dissolute woman can find peace, if not love too.
Lyrics in bold, annotations in parentheses:
He said you were crazy (I needed to start the song with a “Will you just listen to me!?” declaration. “Abbey”/Dolly/our hero would want to avoid this woman coming to her door, right?)
Didn’t realize that the mania was his own making
Smoke and mirrors he can’t pass without a glance (one of the best lines I have ever written: he’s manipulative and conceited, in plainspeak - and it reminds me of Shania’s “comb up his sleeve, just in case” from “That Don’t Impress Me Much”)
Abbey, I’m sorry I stole your man
We said you were obsessed (it was really important for me to prod the “crazy ex” myth, and allow that Jolene did not understand the truth of men who have a bevy of “crazy” exes - what made them that way, I ask?)
When we saw you loping after clues you could get (I think this was a personal reminder to stop Instagram snooping)
Our happiness was ours and leave us be
It didn’t work with you but it worked with me (Sure, Jan.)
Now I understand
Abbey, I’m sorry I stole your man
Courted by a crooked hand (pretty obvious to me but the man is sinister and wicked)
Abbey, I’m sorry I stole your man
He said you called him a hothead
Kept it close to the vest except in bed
Then the lava rained and I’m
Singed red with his brand (he’s so good at hiding things until he’s got you locked down!)
Abbey, I’m sorry I stole your man
Temperatures would run high
White hot passion, over time quite belied
By the purple skies of dawn when he’d come home
And the turquoise vials of his cheap cologne (I really liked these colors together, and this verse always conjures antique store lineups of perfume atomizers)
Twisted ankle on his oil slick of the damned (a way to button up the colors, with an oil slick rainbow1)
Abbey, I’m sorry I stole your man
Dazzled by a calloused hand (a blue-collar allusion, but moreso a hand that has spun this web many a time before, to the point of its dulled sensation)
Abbey, I’m sorry I stole your man
Took no pleasure getting mine behind your back
Took no pleasure in the slither of our attack
It’s no excuse but I learned it from the movies (story of my fucking life)
Love at any cost was the way it should be
Carved the fault lines of my life with my own hand
Abbey, I’m sorry I stole your man
Wisened by a powdered hand (a guy who’s a bit vain and appearance-obsessed)
Abbey, I’m sorry I stole your man
And now he’s ensnared someone else (How you get ‘em is how you lose ‘em!)
Rolled out the hot coal carpet to hell
If you didn’t hate me so much
I’d say we slash the tires on his van (thank god I have actually unionized with ex’s other exes and made our ex’s life worse)
Abbey, I’m sorry I stole your man
Courted by a crooked hand (back to the first chorus)
Abbey, I’m sorry I stole your man
Ohhh oh OH oh, spun me in a practiced dance (two early ideas for the chorus, thrown in here because I couldn’t part with them)
Ohhh oh OHH oh, pillaged for the upper hand
Ohhh oh OH oh, spun me in a practiced dance
Ohhh oh OHH oh, pillaged for the upper hand….
I hope you enjoyed this read-through! Let me know if you’d like me to break down another song!
To listen:
My favorite One Direction song.
I am devastated for Liam Payne’s young son Bear, family, and the boys. I camped out at 4 in the morning with Rebecca and her mom to see 1D sing “Midnight Memories” on Good Morning America. I do NOT play about this band. All my love to Maya Henry, as well, who will be receiving vitriol I can not fathom for something in no way her fault.
To read:
on gray floors and the “The HGTV-ification of America.”GIRL I FELT THIS SO WHOLLY. (via
)As we romanticize vulnerability, we pedestalize those who we see as embodying it. It’s like we’ve created a new Manic Pixie Dream Girl: now we have the Wounded Witchy Healer Girl.1 While the MPDG’s job was to help sad, brooding men appreciate life, the WWHG plays a different role: this vulnerable creature is there to show others that it’s safe to be vulnerable; and that, in being vulnerable, they can restore their faith in intimacy, and heal their relational wounds.
The problem is that the WWHG is also a human being, one who opens themselves up to the possibility of being wounded as they too take the risk that is entering into relationality. The Wounded Witchy Healer Girl is desirable so long as they remain composed, just vulnerable enough to be palatable. Once they get messy, they lose their magic in the eyes of the lover.
“I suspect that there probably is something that I’m learning from my characters. Or I am allowing myself to experience other lives, lives that I haven’t had. One of the things that I find haunting or difficult to accept is that I only get one life. I’m condemned to being myself, and I have to be me until the end. In a way, being a novelist allows me to get around that problem.“ - Sally Rooney interviewed by David Marchese for the Times. She is so stubborn; I love her.
“In 1997, Senator Patrick Leahy conceived and introduced a law — now known as “the Leahy Law” — which prohibits the United States from funding and arming foreign military forces if the Secretary of State has “credible information” that this military unit is violating human rights. By continuing to arm the Israeli military after that report, the U.S. government is in violation of the Leahy Law. And do you know who is saying that we’re in violation of the Leahy Law? The guy who wrote the law! This past May, Patrick Leahy explained how our arming of Israel violates the very law he authored.” -
“Wanna know what’s on your ballot this November? The City made a great guide that breaks down all of the local ballot proposals that you should definitely be voting for. I got my mail-in ballot last week and already sent in my vote!” - from
This is literally just Simone:
This is literally just Lugosi:
Actually my babies:
Various and sundry:
I wish my head was this little:
The original written lyrics!
From Scot:
I hope this is your week: full of teeny hooves, sweet smiles, and ever so soft sheets.
Love you bitches,
TG
I know this one of those songs I'm not going to get out of my head!
What the hell this song is really good!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!