On “Hold U,” it was the warm blanket of “I will hold you” that was enough on “Way Out,” it was “I’ll be here to love you.” Amid all of the expositions of coming undone, De Souza screamed and lullabied her way through agony and ecstasy it was a perfect portrait of someone my age sparring with inescapable harmony of fucking up and falling in love. De Souza never overdid it, refusing to muddy each song’s language by saying too much. I’d found a songwriter who was also on a one-way ticket to the quarter-century mark in life, and the songs she put on Any Shape You Take-like “Hold U,” “Pretty Pictures” and “17”-catered to a very specific type of language I needed: minimal yet honest, thoughtful. I Love My Mom’s chronicling of shortcomings, both romantic and emotional, resembled the headspace of us young adults living in quotidian towns while the immediate world beyond our grasp was folding inwards.Īnd by the time De Souza’s sophomore album, Any Shape You Take, came out in 2021, I felt like I’d already spent an entire lifetime searching for a musician who built a world that felt similar to my own. It might have been easy for folks to write those questions off-especially given De Souza’s age-but, unless you were a college kid in the Trump years, the catastrophe of a mundane life’s chaos will nihilistically endure in all of us. “When am I gonna get out of bed / Like everybody else does, everybody else does? / When am I gonna get a better head / Like everybody else does, everybody else does?” were the first lines of her first album ever. When Asheville, North Carolina hero Indigo De Souza wrote and released I Love My Mom in 2018, she was only 20 years old and already tracking the aches of alienation.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |