Song 23/52: “Doll”
Lyrics:
She doesn’t know I’m in here
She doesn’t have a clue
She gets to be your girlfriend
I get to be with you
I hide out in the closet
It’s nice and dark inside
She gets to cook you dinner
I get to keep you satisfied
When the door locks
And your pants drop
And you feel like messin’ around
I’m a good girl
With my mouth full
So I can’t make a sound
Chorus:
I wanna be your sex-shop treasure
I wanna be your secret pleasure
I wanna be your perfect plaything
So you will think I’m so amazing
And though I’m so alone without you
At least I get to think about you
I wanna be convenient, sweet and small
I wanna be your doll
Your doll, doll, doll
It’s nice to know my purpose
It’s nice to have a home
You always make me nervous
I always make you moan
If this is Stockholm syndrome
I can’t say that I care
You like it when I lie here
I like it when you pull my hair
When the mood strikes
And the vibe’s right
And you feel like messin’ around
When the night falls
I’m a good doll
Who never makes a sound
(repeat chorus)
Songwriting diary:
A friend of mine mentioned he was keeping his sex doll in a closet, and I found that idea weirdly haunting. For a while I had a note in my folder of music ideas that just said, “From the perspective of a sex doll hidden in the closet: She doesn’t know I’m in here…”
I was messing around with that idea and came up with a piano part that reminded me of the Dresden Dolls’ song “Coin-Operated Boy,” which is thematically similar. For a few days I only had the verses and prechoruses, and didn’t know how (or whether) I wanted to finish the song. But then a chorus melody came to me, and I made a recording of myself da-da-da-ing it. I was out walking around doing some errands and kept listening to these two recordings back-to-back, pondering what I wanted to say as the sex doll.
Ultimately the lyrics I came up with for the chorus are very reminiscent of times in my life when I’ve felt used, discarded, and ignored by men I was seeing, or wanted to be seeing. Maybe this is why I was so drawn to that image of the sex doll waiting around in the closet to be used – it reminded me of how it had felt to wait by the phone for a text that would never come, or that would be a booty-call text instead of an I-love-you text.
Song 24/52: “Difficult Woman”
Lyrics:
They call me a difficult woman
‘Cause I’m always late to the set
They chide me for needing reminders of lines
I admit I am prone to forget
I wait every day in my trailer
It gives me time to think
And I’m not a child, so once in a while
I speed up the wait with a drink
Chorus:
I’m not perfect; neither are you
I’ll never be perfect the way they say they want me to
They call me a difficult woman
That rumor was spread by my ex
I helped the director get ever erecter
I shouldn’t mix business with sex
I’m worried my name’s on a blacklist
And that’s why the cameramen stare
But it could be the tits, the charisma and wit
Or it could be my famous blonde hair
(repeat chorus)
They call me a difficult woman
I swear they don’t care if I die
If not for my name and my face and my fame
I doubt that I’d still be alive
I take every pill they prescribe me
I never miss even one dose
And I’ve never taken too many to waken
But honestly, I have come close
(repeat chorus)
I don’t care what secrets they spread
They’ll never defeat me – I’ll never let them kill me dead
Songwriting diary:
I’d been watching a bunch of songwriting challenges on YouTube where someone would use a random word generator to come up with 3-5 words that they would then have to incorporate into a song. One of the times that I did this, the words I got were “me,” “difficult,” and “woman,” which was immediately very evocative to me. I wrote down the line, “They call me a difficult woman,” and then started pondering what type of person/character would say that line and why.
It seemed clear to me pretty quickly that this had to be a song about Marilyn Monroe. I was thinking about how she would often forget her lines while filming Some Like It Hot, show up late to the set, and thereby incur the rage of her male director and co-stars. Her mistakes, it seemed, were always blamed on her and her alone, even though she was struggling with a drug addiction, a painful chronic illness, a history of sexual abuse, and widespread mistreatment by the media and by people in her own industry.
As I wrote the rest of the lyrics, I also started thinking about Judy Garland, who (like many other actors of her time period) was given amphetamines and barbiturates by people at the movie studio she worked for, leading to lifelong struggles with addiction, which were (of course) frequently blamed on Garland herself.
This was such an interesting songwriting process to me because I don’t know that I would have ever sat down and thought, “I’m going to write a song about the injustices faced by midcentury Hollywood starlets” – but the constraints provided by the random word generator inspired me to do exactly that.
Song 25/52: “The One”
Lyrics:
Isn’t it romantic? Isn’t it so sweet
That I could fall in love with anyone I meet?
But you’re the one I stay with; you’re the real thing
The one who I come home to; the one who wears my ring
I’ve been in love with other folks
But none of them got all my jokes
So I’ve been looking for the love
I know that I’ve been dreaming of
Chorus:
You’re the one
The one I need, the one I want, the one
Who keeps me safe and warm, just like the sun
And every day, I’m glad for all you’ve done
You’re the one
I know it’s idealistic, and soulmates aren’t real
But every time I kiss you, that’s just the way I feel
It sparkles like a firework, it’s catchy like a song
Your arms are like my armor; your bed’s where I belong
I know we both have been through hell
At first, it scared me when I fell
Love was work, and now it’s play
And all those memories melt away
(repeat chorus)
I know we’re not invincible
We’ve got a lot to learn
But we’re up to the task
And I think we can last
Even though I know we’ve both been burned
(repeat chorus)
Songwriting diary:
I don’t even know what to write about this one because it mostly just flowed out of me improvisationally! The first verse was inspired by a polyamory-related idea I was thinking about, which I think I first read in Dr. Liz Powell’s book Building Open Relationships: that one of the beautiful things about non-monogamy is that your partner stays with you not because they’d be lonely without you but because they actively choose to be with you specifically.
I worked on the second verse and the bridge over the days after I wrote the first verse and chorus, and did some lyric-editing after it was all done, but musically I don’t really know how this came to me because it just… did. Songwriting is weird like that sometimes.
Anyway, it’s a song about my spouse, who is the love of my life and the person who made all my many years of dating misadventures seem worthwhile just to have met them eventually. When my friend Bex interviewed me about songwriting on our podcast The Dildorks recently, he asked me if there were any subjects I wanted to explore more through my songs that I hadn’t yet, and I said that I’d always struggled to write happy songs about being in love with Matt because our relationship has always just been… really good, and loving, and open, and comfortable. Even when we have conflicts or issues, they’re approached in a way that is loving and compassionate. This song was my attempt to write an uncomplicatedly romantic song about my love, and while I certainly don’t think it’s my best work, I like how it came out.
Song 26/52: “Dear Professor”
Lyrics:
Dear professor, I confess you’re often on my mind
When you lecture and you gesture with those forearms so defined
It’s hard to focus, hard to notice anyone but you
But I obey and get an “A” because you want me to
Your red pen hurts like a slap
I’d love to sit upon your lap
But I don’t like to break the rules
I’ve always felt my safest here at school
Chorus:
I need a lesson
I’m second-guessing myself
I need a witness
I need some forgiveness
I need a teacher
Not some smug and pious preacher
I need some pressure, I need some pressure
I need you, professor
Dear professor, let me guess: you’re married happily
Do you let her give you pleasure? Do you take the lead?
Does she know you? Does she show you reverence at night?
Does she love you more than I do? I don’t think that’s right
Your passion always shines right through
Oh, the things that I would do to you
But I don’t wanna get suspended
And I would be so sad when it ended
(repeat chorus)
When I’m home, and alone
I don’t get to be your girl
In my bed, I feel dead
With my stomach all a-swirl
But in class, I can pass
For a normal somebody
Raise my hand like I planned
If I fall for you, will you call on me?
(repeat chorus)
Songwriting diary:
While feeling uninspired recently, I looked through a Reddit thread of potential song ideas, and one that jumped out at me was “a college student who’s in love with their professor.” This is something I’ve experienced quite strongly many times, and realized I hadn’t really written about in a song before, so I decided to take a crack at it.
I wrote the lyrics for the first verse + prechorus in my Notes app late one night and kinda forgot about them for a while. Then I started trying them out with different melodies and instruments. I had originally envisioned this as kind of a cheeky, cheerful song, but when I paired the lyrics with a more sad-sounding ukulele part, it felt right and I decided to go farther down the path of this being kind of a tragic song about desperately craving validation from someone who can never fully give it to you in the way that you want.
Song 27/52: “Lullaby for Little One”
Lyrics:
You’re never alone when you’re with me
I know you’ve been hurt and I think that’s so shitty
But hey – look where we are today
I know you feel strange and exceptional
But, if it helps, I am strange and bisexual too
You’ve got me and I’ve got you
And I know that deep down, we are one and the same
I know that we’re sharing one body, one name
I know that we also share all of those memories and shame
Chorus:
And I’m here now to listen
And I’m sorry that I’d gone missing
It may not be much, but now that I know you
I know all the love that I wanna show you
And I’ll still be here for you even when everyone goes
I love how you stand up to bullies
The stuff that they scoff at is always so silly
But you, you do what you wanna do
You may not believe that your brain is a blessing
And I know that life can be plenty depressing
But wait – everything’s gonna be great
And when you are lonely, I swear I’ll be here
I’ll never be far from your faith and your fear
I’ve muddied the waters, but soon I can make them run clear
(repeat chorus)
Songwriting diary:
Okay, this one was weird… A month or two ago, a friend of mine submitted the phrase “I am strange and bisexual” when I polled my Instagram followers for songwriting prompts, and I wrote the first verse of this song. I was envisioning it as a song about a friend, maybe a friend who was feeling down about the political onslaughts on LGBTQ+ rights and needed some cheering up. I wrote a chorus for it that I later scrapped which went, “Queers have each other’s backs/ Queers can getcha through it/ Queers help other queers relax/ Almost any queer can do it.” I could’ve continued in this direction but that chorus just didn’t sit right with me, in part because of how much infighting there actually is in queer communities these days.
I set that song aside and didn’t really think about it again until a month or two later, when I was walking around Newark airport and this song just started playing in my head randomly. My brain was kind of chewing on it, figuring something out. And then I sat down at my gate, took out my Kindle and read a chapter or two of You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For by Dick Schwartz, which is about using the principles of Internal Family Systems therapy to improve your relationships. A lot of that book is about getting to know your “inner children” so you can address your traumas and show yourself some compassion, and by the time my flight had started boarding, I’d realized that this song should actually be about my inner child.
When I got back home to my apartment in Toronto a few hours later, I took out my ukulele because I wanted to write a song. I was kind of resistant to the idea of working on the inner child one because it felt too heavy and emotional for the exhausted mood I was in post-travel. So I pulled two tarot cards as songwriting prompts, hoping they would give me a different idea. But the cards I pulled were the Nine of Swords and the Nine of Pentacles, which respectively symbolize (among other things) misery and anxiety, and safety and accomplishment. These notions, paired together, reminded me so much of the work I’ve been doing with Internal Family Systems that I literally said out loud, “OKAY, universe, I will finish that song!!” and then I did. I’m not really a religious person and don’t know exactly what I believe in spiritually, but the creative superconscious often feels wildly tangible to me. I know that sounds pretentious – oh well, it’s true!
I was describing this song to my therapist while it was in the works, and they exclaimed, “Oh! It’s like you wrote a lullaby for your parts!” which of course I immediately wrote down. Ultimately I decided “Lullaby for Your Parts” would seem weirdly sexual out of context, so I went with a slightly altered version of that title 😂