Album: boygenius
Band: boygenius
Released: 26 October 2018
Label: Matador Records
Length: 21:58

The difference between sorrow and anger, for me at least, is that one puts me in the mood to sing and the other does not. Usually, the answer is karaoke—bad karaoke, the kind of karaoke that people sing when they can’t afford decent therapy. Open mic, meet open wound. 

Yesterday, he told me he’d started seeing someone else, and the last girl I kissed before I moved across the country sent me a text telling me she’d been in a bus accident. 

Tonight, I’m singing on stage for the first time in four years, wearing a dress I bought yesterday and socks that go up to my knees to cover up most of the spots I cut my legs shaving. These kinds of cuts, they always bleed more than they hurt, and leave patchy little scabs. I don’t want to spend all night insisting that it hadn’t hurt. 

Tonight, I’m singing on stage with an opera singer a decade my senior who consistently gets asked what high school she goes to, and a synth musician who falls in and out of love so quickly that she’s never been able to manage writing a story longer than six pages. The last song in our set is the last song from this EP. I’ve never been to Ketchum, Idaho: I am never anywhere, anywhere I go. 

Tonight, I’m singing on stage, and it is not karaoke. I’ll have to let you know whether it ends up being bad, or therapeutic, or both. 

The only thing, I think, more strange than how it feels to have almost had and to have almost lost, all at once, is to find that someone else has already put it into words. To find it put it into words, and set to music. 

Drink:
As much gin as you can sneak into a glass of lemonade without having it taste like poison. Or, just enough gin so it definitely does taste like poison.