The era of the overshare is back.
Perfected by forerunners such as Fiona Apple and Alanis Morissette, this fall has already seen two music stars gift us with lay-it-all-out-there lyrics.
The first, of course, was Taylor Swift, who earlier this month released a song titled “Wood,” which was about a lot more than trees.
Now, we have been graced with Lily Allen’s supremely well-executed fifth studio album “West End Girl,” her first record in seven years. It is unanimously thought to be an agonizingly detailed reflection on her whirlwind marriage to and apparently grisly breakup with her estranged husband, “Stranger Things” actor David Harbour.
CNN has reached out to representatives for both Allen and Harbour for comment.
Aside from brandishing her trademark courage to be fundamentally vulnerable, hurt and pissed (in the American sense) on the record, Allen really goes there in the seventh track, titled “Pussy Palace.”
The song, and the album as a whole, notably doesn’t namecheck Harbour. But it does recount a time after Allen and a partner fought — and in the song, she brings some personal effects to his apartment since she doesn’t want him in her bed.
Upon arriving, she realizes “something don’t feel right,” as she sings, because the space she had previously thought was her partner’s “dojo” was actually his … insert NSFW title of song here.
“So am I looking at a sex addict?” she asks in the chorus, before launching into an extremely confessional second verse that describes a “shoebox full of handwritten letters, from broken-hearted women wishing you could have been better.”
After detailing a messy scene with “sheets pulled off the bed, they’re strewn all on the floor, long black hair, probably from the night before,” Allen sings about a now-infamous “Duane Reade bag” with tied handles that’s full of unmentionable intimate objects along with “hundreds of Trojans.”
Allen is here to remind us that when it comes to artistic expression, there really is no such thing as oversharing.
On a simplistic level, the album “West End Girl” feels like an update to Morissette’s jaggedly confessional breakup anthem “You Oughta Know” from exactly three decades ago. This is all light years away from Carly Simon’s mother-of-all-relationship-burns “You’re So Vain” in terms of burn factor, mixing the rawness of an Apple postmortem with the good ol’ resignation of Carole King’s “It’s Too Late.”
As with the breakup music that came before, Allen’s is a reminder that art is at once pain and healing. Her sharing every emotional stop on what we’re led to believe is a train wreck of a separation becomes, in expert hands, a peek into what are extremely relatable moments.
Like, raise your hand if you’ve ever been on either side of the situation she depicts in the song “Tennis,” in which Allen sings of a partner who is protecting the things on his phone he doesn’t want her to see — “then you showed me a photo on Instagram / it was how you grabbed your phone back right out of my hands.”
Look, relationships are hard. But maybe what isn’t so hard for artists like Allen and Swift? Laying it all out on the table, warts and all, for listeners to pick apart and, yes, be totally shocked over.
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