You Don’t Know Who I Am

Slow Club “Two Cousins”

I originally wrote about this song twice – once on this site and only scratching the surface of it, and again on Pitchfork in the context of a review of the album it’s from, Paradise. I’m coming back to it now as I’m going back through favorite songs from the past decade.

It’s generally understood that listeners make their own meanings for songs, but this one for me is an example of deliberately only hearing what I want so I can hammer it into what I’ve needed it to be. And what I’ve needed it to be is so specific and personal I don’t really want to get into it, but it’s really just tapping into the core of what this song is actually intended to be about, which is estrangement. Rebecca Taylor’s lyrics put that feeling in the context of family, but those are the bits I’ve learned to tune out in the interest of utility. What I’m really interested in here is the way she sings it all – you can hear a lot of guilt and regret in her voice. She sounds defeated, like she knows there’s just no fixing what’s gone wrong.

This song is from the summer of 2011 and from the distance of autumn 2019, the song resonates in a slightly different way. Back then relating to this song was urgent and rooted in events of the recent past, but now it’s all stuff I have to strain to remember. Things that were once incredibly important are vague memories now, and people become strangers. So now the part that really cuts deep is the end of the chorus, in which Taylor imagines crossing paths again in the future: “I look into your eyes / you don’t know who I am.” And that’s where I am now – a stranger to even this old version of myself. It’s about a different sort of loss now.

Buy it from Bandcamp.