Song: “Melt Your Heart”

Some sad songs for your saddest Valentine.

I bought this album as a little treat to myself tonight. I said hello to my friend Jessie at the counter at Amoeba, and then made a beeline for this. I’ve been promising myself for days I’d get it, but tonight I found myself alone, voiceless, and in the mood for this lady’s voice, which I’ve loved and coveted from the first time I heard her sing, years and years ago in a tiny little concert hall in LA.

I’ve already listened to it all the way through once, and I’m halfway through the second pass. “Rise Up With Fists!“, “You Are What You Love“, and “It Wasn’t Me” are sure to be new playlist staples.

For me, Jenny Lewis’s songs are about finding my way through California, figuring out what kind of woman I’m going to be while I’m here. There are happy days and painful days, and hours of wistful longing. There are plans made that might never see the light of day, but there are also goals I can’t even conceive of that I will achieve. She whispers my secret fears, the ones I don’t want to admit I have. She howls my aches and pains, giving them more validity and depth than I could ever allow my self-wallowings. She’s smarter than I am, writing the perfect little jabs that make me wish I could be better at being a good woman. She sings to the empty beer bottles that line the kitchen counter after everybody’s gone home. Her songs are for long car trips in the cool, desert night, her voice the only sound in the space between me and the man by my side, the one who hasn’t said anything in a while, but I still know exactly what he’s thinking.