"All couples in love are alike; each shattered couple, however, has been shattered in its own way. When you fall in love with someone, your friends tolerate you talking about them and fawning over them. But when someone fucks you over-when they break your heart-we want the details. We want to know that Taylor Swift left her scarf there at his sister's house and that Alanis Morissette went down on him in a theater. We want to know every gory little piece of what happened to you. Show us the knife wound. Show us the knife."
"Part of creating anything is understanding which parts of you are interesting to others, and Lily Allen knows that in a breakup what people want (be they friends or fans) is details. On Friday, with just a few days' warning, Allen dropped a 14-song, 44-minute album called West End Girl. It's an ideal breakup album because it's petty and unconcerned with fairness. It throws all the dirty laundry right out onto the street."
"The first song, the titular "West End Girl," sounds sweet and like a fairytale. "And now we're all here, we've moved to New York / We've found a nice little rental near a sweet little school / Now I'm looking at houses with four or five floors / And you've found us a brownstone, said 'You want it? It's yours,'" Allen sings, while angelic production swells behind her voice. For the first two minutes of the song, she sets up the story. The singer moved to New York, bought an insane brownstone she couldn't afford with her partner, then got offered the lead in a play. Her partner was dismissive of this achievement, and then she went back to London to perform it."
People crave the minute, gory details of breakups rather than the rosy parts of falling in love. Lily Allen released a 14-song, 44-minute album titled West End Girl with minimal advance notice. The album functions as a breakup record that is petty, unconcerned with fairness, and intent on airing dirty laundry publicly. The opening track sounds sweet and fairytale-like while recounting moving to New York, buying an unaffordable brownstone with a partner, landing a lead in a play, and returning to London after a partner's dismissiveness. The lyrics read as clearly autobiographical, with context including a 2018 divorce and a 2019 Raya match.
Read at Defector
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