Lily Allen's New Record Hits A Nerve So Deep Inside Of Me That I Feel Physically Sick Listening To It...And I Can't Stop Listening. (Patreon)

Hello loves.

So many people texted me about the album the day it dropped.

Amanda. Have you heard this?

I wrote in The Guardian, in 2016, about how Nick Cave's album "Skeleton Tree" unlocked some part of my inner songwriter and goaded me on the tracks that would become "There Will Be No Intermission".

Please listen to Lily Allen's new album, "West End Girl". (You can find it here on her website, which itself a work of art at the moment.)

...........

Sometimes, I find a song or an album that pulls me out of an ambivalent artistic rut. Lily Allen's record just did that.

The first few times I gave this record a listen, my body had a - literally - physically sick reaction to some of the lyrics. They hit so close to home, so close to the bone.

And yet....I couldn't stop listening, lke some sort of deranged emotional-music-addict, because the stark and brutal truth of the songs was packaged in sweet-synth addictive hooks: the songs lured me back.

Every listen made me feel less alone.

This is album is pure two-way catharsis: for her, for me. An all-way catharsis for any human being who's ever been brutalized and traumatized by a relationship.

Listening to the album over the last few days has, honestly, felt like a disembodied group therapy session across time and space: millions of women the globe over cranking up "West End Girl" in their car stereos and earbuds with the thirst of a dying, unseen person; a globally orchestrated audience of rage-filled, aggrieved and broken-hearted mother-listeners all shaking their heads so hard that the earbuds tumble onto the ruined, dog-hair-matted, baby-shit-stained, cheerio-dusted carpet.

I find myself thinking: what am I going to do with my own rage-filled piano song collection of late? OH NO! DO THEY NEED SYNTHESIZERS AND AUTOTUNE? WHAT HAVE I DONE?

Listen to Lily for a moment.

Note: the lyrics may pull you in, but you have to LISTEN to the song, please...because it's the pure, mid-tempo synth-y sweetness of the production and That Classic Flat-affect Lily Vocal Delivery that truly makes the song so heartbreaking and effective...

I found a shoebox full of handwritten letters
From brokenhearted women wishing you could have been better
Sheets pulled off the bed, strewn on the floor
Long black hair, probably from the night before
Duane Reade bag with the handles tied
Sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside
Hundreds of Trojans, you're so fucking broken

How'd I get caught up in your double life...?

And that's when I realised (realised)
Something don't feel right

I didn't know it was a pussy palace, pussy palace, pussy palace, pussy palace
I always thought it was a dojo, dojo, dojo

So am I looking at a sex addict, sex addict, sex addict, sex addict?
I'll talk about a low blow, oh, no, oh, no

...........

It's the details. It's that it's so. Fucking. Relatable.

But it's also...the production. It's about something else, something that ONLY Lily Allen can do...and that, I'll get to in a moment.

I cannot remember a time that an album has stuck a chord this deep in my loins, in my heart, in my head.

I can tick off albums of the past twenty years that went on high rotation into my headphones and car stereo because I loved and connected with the words and music so deeply. "Fevers and Mirrors" by Bright Eyes (I got it late, it went into my ears in 2003), when I needed someone to screech pure pain and poetry into my ears while on early Dresden Dolls tours, "Under My Skin" by Avril Lavigne (when I wanted some painful pop candy to just turn my brain to sweet mush in 2004...again, on tour, and I was way more tired), and lately: Nick Cave's "Skeleton Tree" hit me square in the post-patrum womb, where I needed to be hit as both a mother and a songwriter, in 2016. Phoebe Bridger's "Punisher" helped me through quite a few panic-stricken days in 2021, and Chappell Roan's masterpiece "Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess" has seen me and my kid and my friends dancing in my kitchen as I try to reign it in after a horrifically hard transition back to my hometown in the wake of my equally horrific divorce.

From Relapse (but once again....please put on headphones)

I need a drink
I need a valium
You pushed this far

The ground is gone beneath me, you pulled the safety net
I moved across an ocean from my family from my friends
The foundation is shattered, you've made such a fucking mess
I tried to be your modern wife but the child in me protests

I need a drink, I need a valium
You pushed this far and I just need to be numb

...........

It's just so...brutally emotionally honest, which one can expect from Lily Allen, but this is next level honesty, and the fact that the world is cheering her on gives me the answer I need about my own work. It unlocks the next level of permission for women in the seemingly unwinnable video game called Patriarchy that we all must play, every day, whether or not we feel like playing.

As women in the music industry who live under the punishing glare of the press and the public….and under the constant surveillance of our detractors….we can still scream and/or deftly bossa nova our truths.

We can still work and still find peace.

Women are screaming the praises of this record because Lily is speaking from the darkest parts of their hearts.

I used to be like Lily; I used to sing the pain of the group. It was why my band got big. It was why I found success as a songwriter. I tapped into something relatable, universal.

Lately, I've had to rely on others to do the job for me (see my piece about Jinkx Monsoon singing a Dresden Dolls song at Carnegie hall).

Lily is doing the job for all of us.

Lily is singing what most women - including me - cannot.

Not yet.

For many women, not ever.

The cost is simply too high; or the microphone too out of reach.
...........

Believe me: this is not just about Lily Allen, her personal life, and this record.

This album lands at a time when women are feeling pushed into a dark, dark corner.

We've never felt more voiceless, powerless, crushed by a goevernment that does not care about our emotional, physical, and mental health; nor about that of our children.

Trump is not even a year into his term.

Help is not on the way.

Mark my words: Women telling the truth - whatever the cost - is going to be the lifeboat out of here, people. We all walk so we can all run.

We sing and push each other back up to the mic.

...........

I have been touring my own new searing material for the last few years, the heartbroken songs I've written in the wake of my own horrorshow.

The songs I've written lately are like...twins? (Cousins? Shadow-puppets?)...of Lily's songs, and I've been having long, complicated talks with my own management and you, the patrons who've been coming to the lofts and living rooms to listen.

We have all been in this wide-reaching community discussion about what to do with them?

Record them? Put them out? Put them into a single theater show? CAll them pure cahtarsis and lave them in a shoebox fulll of handwritten letters?

I think this album helps me to understand, very honestly, what the best thing to do is.

...........

Amanda. Have you heard this?

I was on tour last week, on the way to Seattle last week, when I read the lyrics on a plane. That was a fascinating experiment: I don't think I've ever read a full set of album lyrics before listening to the album itself.

I found myself blinking at the lyrics, moved by some, shocked by some, but mostly wondering: "What the hell is this going to SOUND like?"

It was a exercise in the genius of music, and music production.

Its' the fact that the words weren't enough: it had to be in Lily's singular sweet pop voice. It couldn't just be the words, the details. It's the wall of synths, it's the way she pulls a quote from the "Stranger Things" theme song before bashing the truth out. It's the musical blanket she wraps around you. It's the sonic glass of wine and meal she sets on the table before sitting down, holding your hands, and saying: he ruined my life, and I'm going to tell you everything. It's a story that has to be delivred in a certain way, because she can't tell you this with words, over text. It wouldn't work as a book, a poem, or an Instagram rant.

AS I've been reminding myself: music can save or salvage certain things that nothing else can.

Music is sometimes the only lifeboat away from a burning, sinking ship.

She did it. She did it.

I do wonder what would have happened if she'd put the album out in 2017, when her kids were younger (they're 12 and 13 now). Punished? Crucified for being a bad mother? Possibly. Probably. Is she being crucified now? In some circles, probably. The Financial Times panned the record and assassinated her character.

But she's a pro at being on the cancel crucifixion cross at this point, so it's really just Lily playing nad gauging her own video game and asking a question so many women must ask themselves nowadays: what's the cost/benefit of being a woman with a story to tell, knowing that the truth will crucify you, but the silence just might kill you?

As I wondered this to myself, I found an article that spoke to it:

From Nadine Reagan's take in the Irish Times:

There’s never a right time in life to be a cheater, but tough luck to any man who has decided to do the dirt in late-stage 2025: Lily Allen is taking names. The British singer famed for 2000s hits including The Fear and Smile has re-entered the cultural conversation with a new album that unpicks with acid honesty the breakdown of her second marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour and casts a gimlet eye on why it is that women endure romantic betrayal....

....Is Allen’s brave new life – emigrating from London with her two daughters to the US for her new man – a fool’s errand? Is her spouse, she sings, retreating to a “pussy palace” in the West Village with sex toys, condoms and a shoebox of handwritten love letters from heartbroken women? There’s gossipy shock value in the chiselled phrases, but it’s the emotional honesty from Allen that sears like a hot iron on skin.

The record is designed to make cheating men feel queasy and cheated-on women feel supported and understood. It’s a rare combination: bold and rather brilliant.

If some of the lyrical bluntness feels overly intimate – a detractor might argue she’s setting her house ablaze just for the warmth of the fire and the attention from the fire engine squad – what it says about the plight of women and dating is significant. Tinder was launched in 2012. Raya, the celebrity dating app where Allen met Harbour in 2019, began in 2014. The fading popularity of dating apps speaks to a simple reality: what looks like more choice in dating has wound up reading an awful lot like failure, as women and men struggle with feeling like they’re just one more picture to be flicked past: as insubstantial and commodified to suitors as an AI bot. One of the best lines on the album is Allen’s admission that she decided to lose herself – becoming invisible, denying her needs – to avoid losing her husband. She suggests she agreed to an open marriage policy – allowing for paid-for sex or sex with strangers – to hang on to their marriage.

It’s an odd feeling – to imagine that Allen could so fear being seen as old-fashioned or, at 40, as she sings, just plain old, that she might be willing to colour outside the lines of a traditional relationship to keep a spouse happy. But she’s not alone in seeming unsure about how the rules of dating work now. On the album, she reaches out to a lover of her husband’s called “Madeline” and the pair discuss the nature of the open relationship. Madeline texts to say that if rules have been broken, then “please let me know ‘cause I have my own feelings about dishonesty”.

What a mess. Until it isn’t. “I can walk out with my dignity, if I lay my truth on the table,” Allen sings. Her vulnerability on the record is an exercise in regaining power.

.........

So I asked myself, after a few listens:

Have I.....got it all wrong with my own songs?

Dammit. Maybe I'm...too loud. Maybe they're too much.

I scream, I whisper, I pound the piano, I play in the style of a stunted, mangled Bach, at moments I sing myself raw, the songs are pure white hot fire coming off of me, out of me.

Maybe this is all wrong, I thought for a moment.

Maybe I should be like Lily.

Maybe I should call in a producer to put these songs into a tighter package, do them Phoebe Bridgers style, do them Lily Allen style, add little omnichord flourishes, bossa nova beats, squash the hard edges....maybe we just need to produce them with strings....?

And I, of course, stopped myself in my tracks.

Because, like Lily Allen, I am fundamentally fucking smart.

And this is what women the world over are starting to understand:

Only you.

Only you can tell this story.

Only you can tell this story. And you must tell it in your own voice.

You have to use your voice, your art form, your one wild and perfect piano-slam, whatever that is for you.

Your poem, your novel, your documentary about healing from your abusive divorce by filming yourself dancing in your kitchen for three years, every day.

As women, we have been so trapped in the punishing narrative form that the world seems to demand.

Tell the story, but tell it....nicely! Palatably. Don't be too soft. Don't be too loud. Don't be too embarrassing. Above all, good lighting, wear lipstick, preferably red.

Game the algorithm! You got this, girl!

But.....stop. There is another way.

There is a voice, a true-er voice, a voice that doesn't have to please or match the algorithm.

Here's the thing:

Telling your story with another woman's production style is never the strongest choice. It won't ring true to the listener. It'll sound....afraid.

...........

If I'm going to tell my own story, and I must, it will need to be told the way.....it asks me to be told, by this little voice inside my head that says: this sounds like you.

I will tell you something about my writing lately: these recent songs came out of me nearly fully formed...they were mostly written in one sitting. All my best songs - through my entire career - have been one-sitting songs. And they're not pretty. They're not tight. They don't even follow any kind of obvious structure. They're....wrong.

But they're mine.

I've been on a roll, pumping these songs out of my broken heart for the last year and change...and I don't think I've ever cried so much while songwriting. Every time the tears started to flow, I knew I was hitting something deeply relatable. So I'd let the tears fall and keep writing, keep writing, keep singing, to the end of the idea.

Lily makes it clear, people.

This is how the songs will come out:

I will scream, I will whisper, I pound the fucking piano, I will play in the style of a stunted, mangled Bach, at moments I will sing myself raw, the songs will be pure white hot fire coming off of me, out of me.

Lily Allen did the way only Lily could do it. I'll do it the way only Amanda could do it. And like that, we will raft up our lifeboats together, and get the fuck out of here. There is power in numbers.

Add your singular voice to the chorus of truth.

Do it only the way you can, my friend. That's the light to follow, that's the path out of the dark.

I love you, all, so much.

XXXX

A

P.S. Here are some photos from tour last weekend, if you missed them.

(Amanda Eckert, from Minneapolis, MN)

(Laura Vogel, from Portland, OR)

More photos, and I wrote a little wrap post of the Minneapolis show here, and the Seattle/Portland shows here.

xxx

AFP