Friday Song: “Perfect Daughter”
Written for all womanhood, it’s lyrical accomplishment comes in content and meter
As I’ve written before, the Warning’s new release, Everything’s Falling, is one hell of an album. I featured the title track in early September, and am back now with another: “Perfect Daughter.”
The song has many great elements to recommend it, on top of the overall theme, which I will discuss. But here are some things to listen for:
- Musical choices that create tension and release around sneer (tension) and righteous anger (release)
- A soundscape full of distortion dominated by exquisite closeness and clarity for voices — it seems like a meaningful production choice
- A drop in the middle that is perfectly empty and perfectly timed to create tension and release itself
- Harmonies that swell and add power
The meaning of the song is analyzed well in a reaction by Glen Joseph Robinson, a UK-based musician and performer who has become a big fan of the band. Essentially, it’s a song about women being both god-like in that they give life while heaped with expectations of behaving like nice little girls even when they become independent women. This kind of casual misogyny is apparently pretty bad in the music industry, as in too many other places in modern society.
- The expectation trap is described by the band elsewhere by how when they wear sunglasses, they are viewed as standoffish, but if they take them off and aren’t wearing eye makeup, they are viewed as not putting in enough effort. Meanwhile, their male counterparts in the music industry suffer no such criticisms.
In the end, the song is about how it’s not acceptable to be expected to be “the perfect daughter” when you have surmounted that role and then some.
As usual with the Warning, the lyrics are a wonder, this time with an extra flourish on top. Bands can stagnate with meter choices that become rote or predictable. Here, the band shows how they are willing to take excellent lyrics with interesting meters and split them across musical phrases so that they avoid any meter trap and create something unique and ear-catching on top of excellent music.
This is a lyric video, so the images are spun out from animated photos and the like.
Enjoy!
BONUS
If you want to see these three in a stripped down setting so their talents are on full display, here you go: