I'm A Ghost And You All Know It

My parents have been cleaning out their house. They give me two boxes of things to go through. I don’t really want any of it, but I keep a couple things because I can. A defective viewfinder that instead of showing Pokémon as advertised displays stills from Mecca. A Green Day shirt still reeking of puberty declaring “Class of ‘13”. A postcard I wrote to myself but never sent. Stuff imbued with meaning because it’s been held on to for so long, it doesn’t make sense to give it up now.

Lady Lamb’s debut studio album Ripley Pine compiles songs she had been playing for five or six years. Lamb doesn’t fall victim to the tempting amber of studio-time and production, and the songs do not lose the luster of their live performances: all strings bent to near-breaking, teeth gnashing delivery that holds its own in a mosh pit, never-corny carnival theatrics. The opening of “Bird Balloons” exemplifies all these qualities.

The song morphs, shifting tones and moods every minute or so. It mimics for me the experience of grieving anything. Everything felt at once: rage, regret, relief. I love the way she creeps up on so many of her refrains, gaining confidence in surreality through repetition:

What the fuck does that mean? It means whatever it makes you feel, even—especially—if that’s confusion or potent unease. Loss unmakes our realities. In between these asides into madness are the crystal bright and warm recollections like this:

The simplicity of this image contrasts with the preceding chorus, and amplifies both its own portrait of safety and therefore the disorder of the surrounding parts. It’s the moment of a dream remembered distinctly while all else fades into synaptic silt. The kind memory slipped between all the junkmail of our pasts. The thing worth keeping.

The plaintive final chorus expands on this move:

All the obtuse images melt away in the face of the simple fact. (In earlier live versions of the song the line went “More than my friend…” Sometime in 2010, even before the studio, she changed it to this declarative direct address.)

Likewise, there are several vocalizations that stand out: after “loss of love” she crows, “AH”, which sounds a bit like that one bent note that holds down the main guitar riff. Then after crooning “and our breath caught” she GASPS in pure dramatic fashion. These outbursts accentuate their accompanying tender moments—putting breathless wordless feeling into times that can only be recalled with newfound frustration or intensity.

What do we hold onto? Sorting through life’s detritus in my childhood home is a rare moment of literal self-making; finding what belongs in the museum of my memory. Once, when I was young, the basement flooded, and we spent days pulling shit from the sopping wreck. I don’t remember what we lost or saved. It was so long ago.

Lady Lamb can’t jettison all the ill her narrator feels without losing something loved.

All this leads to the incredible outro, which reprises the opening lines, mutated slightly, and punctuated with a bone-chilling forced laugh.

The intro’s self-deprecation becomes such righteous fury. I don’t doubt there’s a specific person this song is addressed to, but I like to think it’s also addressed to the feeling itself. Don’t you wish you could get back at grief? Make it remember you and what it did so carelessly? The galloping guitar ramps up, earnest and desperate signaling of The End. There’s no escape. I like to think that’s the shift, though: in the beginning the song chased the singer, when it should’ve been the one running all along.

This song has made my spotify wrapped several years in a row. lol. Which songs have made yours?