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LCD Soundsystem “Get Innocuous!” (Electric Lady Version)

Is it actually awful to be normal? Is having money inherently bad? Is being boring the worst thing you can be? Is comfort a trap? Are nice, shiny, new things devoid of soul? Is friendliness just a way of being fake and insincere? If you’re happy and content, are you really just dumb and oblivious? “Get Innocuous!” is built on the assumption that all of this is true, but that the real question is how much any of it really matters. James Murphy sounds exhausted by fighting it all, and even more tired by living the life of an artist, where everything that used to be fun is now just work.

Murphy’s arrangement starts out tight but just keeps getting tighter and more dense as it progresses. It’s a very mechanical feeling, like a complex system moving in perfect unison towards some clearly defined goal. It’s a very seductive groove, and even though Nancy Whang is chanting “you can normalize / don’t it make you feel alive?” in a sarcastic tone, it still comes across like an enticing invitation in the context of the beat. They pull you into the machine, and then you think “oh, this is not so bad.” And the rub of the song is there is no ironic twist or reveal. It’s not any more of a trap than anything else in life. It’s just another thing to do, another perspective on being alive. The hollow feeling in the song isn’t about what happens to you when you “normalize,” but rather what it feels like to have your old convictions fade away and be replaced by nothing in particular.

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Ariana Grande “Make Up”

Ariana Grande shines brightest on songs in which her voice seems to hover just above the beat, and chords seems to float around her presence. “Make Up” has the same head-in-the-clouds infatuated tone as the best songs on last year’s Sweetener, but with a little more edge to it. The lyrics about make up sex are cute, but they are just scaffolding for Grande’s impressively nimble and expressive vocal melody. She’s drawing a lot from the vocal syncopation commonly found in rocksteady and dancehall here, but without putting on some horrible faux patois. There’s one melodic bit in the verses that sounds extremely Studio One to me, but I can’t quite figure out whether or not it’s reminding me of a specific song. I just know that I wish I could hear a Studie One legend like Marcia Griffiths, Willie Williams, or Sugar Minott take a crack at singing it. Either way, this approach suits Grande’s voice rather well – she’s very graceful around a beat, and makes parts which require a great deal of focus and breath control sound breezy and casual.

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Default Genders “Black Pill Skyline”

James Brooks’ lyrics focus on vivid portraits of very contemporary characters, with details so extremely specific that it can make you cringe with recognition even when it’s not even a particularly embarrassing thing. For example, in this song he references the Edith Zimmerman (“that writer from the Hairpin”) profile of Chris Evans and writing trip reports on Erowid, and ends on a semi-ironic “that’s the tea.” Brooks’ tone can get a bit glib, but his empathy is much stronger than his sense of detached irony. Even when he’s singing from the perspective of a bitter, judgmental asshole, he’s not asking you to go “ugh, what an asshole.” He’s more interested in just showing you someone else’s thought processes, and little bits of life that add up to not much other than a dissatisfied person. “Black Pill Skyline,” like all the songs on Main Pop Girl 2019, leans heavily on a very early ‘90s production style, and while that could also feel glib and ironic, it doesn’t quite land that way. Brooks is aware that it can seem that way, but just presents it all with as much sincerity as he can bring to it. It’s not a wink. It’s sustained eye contact.

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Lady Lamb “Even In the Tremor”

“Even in the Tremor” has a restless, twitchy feeling to it. It’s not quite an anxious energy – it’s more like having more energy and emotion than feels comfortable, and feeling thwarted in your attempts to shake it off. Lady Lamb sings the song with a tough, confident voice. It’s a very “let’s cut the bullshit” tone, and it’s directed as much outward as it is inward. It seems at first that she’s addressing a romantic partner, but upon closer listening it just sounds like she’s mostly just laying into herself and trying to make sense of both her emotional state and her relationship with the past. The chorus really stands out here: “The future kills the present if I let it.” What a wonderfully ambiguous phrase! I tend to not be a very sentimental person and forget a lot, so it sounds reassuring to me. I can imagine a lot of other people would find that notion totally horrifying.

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Hand Habits “Placeholder”

“Placeholder” is basically the opposite perspective of R.E.M.’s “The One I Love.” Whereas Michael Stipe sang from the point of view of a cold, manipulative person who toyed with people’s emotions so he could have a “simple prop” to occupy his time, Meg Duffy is the person realizing how little they mean to someone who has used them. The song isn’t angry or even all that sad. It’s more about processing emotions than the feelings themselves. There’s a wistful quality to the music, particularly in the distorted lead guitar lines, but Duffy’s lyrics and vocal performance are cold and logical, like they’re meant to counter this other person with their own icy approach. It sounds like someone who is putting up their guard and hardening their heart. It’s a bit tragic in that way.

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Interpol “Evil”

It used to seem that Paul Banks writing lyrics as though English was his third language was a drawback to Interpol, but over the time it’s now clear this is a feature and not a bug. This man is an expert craftsman of word salads. Some lines are so odd and awkward they make a song more memorable than it would be otherwise, while other lyrics are like Rorschach blots set to music. Banks’ best lines are highly evocative phrases that pop up out of nowhere at the most dramatic moment of a song, like when he belts out “you’re making people’s lives feel less private” midway through “Not Even Jail.” Banks knows that anything sounds intense and serious when sung in his harsh nasal tone, so he has a lot of license for both strangeness and ambiguity. Nonsense sounds better with a paranoid, bug-eyed tone.

I have to say all this because I need you to know that I understand what Banks is all about but still can’t hear “Evil” without my brain trying to sort out a narrative. Like, why is he addressing two different women here? Who is Rosemary, and who is Sandy? Do they know each other? When he asks Sandy “why can’t we look the other way,” is it because he’s cheating on her with Rosemary while he’s out on tour? Or maybe it’s the other way around, and he’s being wrongly accused? He sounds like such a manipulative cad, though. He barely seems to like either woman. Pretty much every line in “Evil” is vivid, but the feelings and settings and details resist all narrative structure. It scrambles memories and chops up moments on a timeline like if Alain Resnais wrote a post-punk song.

Interpol tend to get a lot of credit for creating atmosphere, but not as much for the nuance of their craft as songwriters. “Evil” is a brilliantly composed pop song, and makes the most of the band’s sharp and uptight dynamics while giving space for a loose swing that’s generally absent from their music. This is a song that could stand up well to all sorts of arrangements – it’s not hard to hear this remade as an elegant chamber pop song, or slowed down into more of a sludgy metal dirge. Banks’ verse melody is so lovely that you could play it a lot of ways, but it’s still hard to imagine topping their carefully calibrated balance of aloofness, dumb lust, confusion, and disdain.

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Future Punx “Want to Be Wanted”

The lyrical conceit of “Want to Be Wanted” is approaching the basics of human interaction from a scientific standpoint – research, trials, data. It’s a lot of work to explain something very obvious, which is that people need to feel useful and desired. Future Punx play the song in a way that flips the uptight, severe seriousness of Wire-derived punk into a low-key campiness. It’s knowingly silly, but still quite earnest in its thoughts about what motivates people. They’re trying to think clearly and rationally, but can only conclude that desires are inconsistent and confusing. Even in understanding the root of feelings doesn’t make them predictable or sensible.

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Snail’s House “プラネット・ガール”

The best elevator pitch I could give you for Snail’s House is that it’s like Discovery-era Daft Punk filtered through the aesthetics of J-Pop. It’s a big, bright, bouncy sound that sounds like pure, earnest optimism. There’s something so wholesome about this – it’s music that sounds like it’s from a world where everything is fun and nothing is creepy.

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MADMADMAD “Gwarn”

And this one is just the opposite. “Gwarn” has very ‘00s aesthetics, like the DFA and Ed Banger discographies colliding at top speed into a Misshapes party. It’s seedy but glamorous, like a pretty rich kid who’s filthy and gross in designer clothes. It’s fun, but largely because it evokes a world where everything is creepy.

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Maren Morris “Girl”

Maren Morris sings with a confident, bold voice that fits comfortably in a range of mainstream styles – country, EDM pop, rock – the way a good vanilla ice cream pairs well with most any dessert. There’s a little bit of twang in her voice, and a dash of soulfulness, and a trace of attitude. She doesn’t have a lot of character, but she can sell a big feeling. “Girl,” a country rock power ballad she wrote with the increasingly prolific producer Greg Kurstin, is a pep-talk anthem that makes the most of vocal gifts. The contours of the song show off different aspects of her voice – grit on the verses, warmth on the bridge, and a go-for-broke passion on the chorus. It would not be surprising if this was deliberately written as a vocal showcase, and as such, I’m pretty sure this will eventually be a karaoke hit. It’s got all the right dynamics, and the utility of lyrics that express a genuine love and concern for a woman who’s down on her luck.

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I have been laid off from BuzzFeed after working there for six and a half years. I started there as the music editor, but the majority of my time there has been serving as the company’s Director of Quizzes. (Here is a page collecting my favorite quizzes, reviews, interviews, and miscellaneous funny posts.)

BuzzFeed was a fantastic place to work, and the fact that I could mutate my career path so drastically is a good example of the sort of flexibility and creativity that has made the company quite successful. While it is not ideal to be laid off, I can say that I pretty much did everything I wanted to do in my time there, and had been feeling a bit adrift in the recent past. It was time to move on, and sometimes the world has to force your hand.

You might be wondering – wait, why would they lay you off? You were doing the quizzes, and that brings in a lot of money! Well, that is true. But another thing that is true is that a LOT of the site’s overall traffic comes from quizzes and a VERY large portion of that traffic comes from a constant flow of amateur quizzes made by community users. In the recent past, the second highest traffic driver worldwide has been a community user in Michigan who is a teenager in college who, for some reason, makes dozens of quizzes every week. It’s kinda amazing how much revenue-generating traffic the site gets from unpaid community volunteers. So, in a ruthless capitalist way, it makes sense for the company to pivot to having community users create almost all of the quizzes going forward. I understand math. I get it.

Anyway, I am now looking for work! I have two parallel careers, so let me break this up a bit.

• I am looking for work that allows me to continue on with the fairly complex skill set I developed at BuzzFeed. I was in editorial but worked with teams in video, social media, product, engineering, data, business, and creative – quizzes touched almost every part of the company, so I often worked as an internal consultant. A lot of my job involved looking at data and the big picture of what the audience wanted, developing strategy, and encouraging writers to come up with creative ways of entertaining the audience and expanding the range of what we could do.

I worked closely with the tech side of the company in developing new apps, formats, and tools. A huge amount of my job involved constant formal and technical experimentation. A lot of what I did involved understanding human psychology, and how to make things that resonated with people and encouraged them to share results that flattered or amused them. The job involved a deep understanding of semiotics in pop culture and cuisine. A large portion of what I wrote was comedic in nature. I have a very nuanced understanding of a mainstream audience primarily composed of young women, and am almost certainly the world’s foremost expert on online quizzes.

I feel like there’s a lot of applications for all of this in technology, advertising, and media. Probably a lot of other things I haven’t even considered, really. I’m open to anything. If you want to reach out, I’m at perpetua@gmail.com, and here is my LinkedIn page.

• I am in the market to write about music, movies, television, comics, and other pop culture things for whoever is interested in having me. I am also working on a book of music writing and shopping around for an agent and a publisher. Please hit me up if you would like to work with me on any of these things!

If you’ve read this far, I’d like to acknowledge a lot of the key people I’ve worked with over the past several years.

Anjali Patel is probably the most brilliant and impressive person I have ever worked with, and watching her evolve from a shy workaholic into a bold, one-of-a-kind hybrid of writer, artist, and product designer has been a privilege. Cates Holderness, Ryan Broderick, Katie Notopoulos, and Bob Marshall understand the internet better than anyone else on earth. Joanna Borns, Andrea Hickey, Alexis Nedd, Erin Chack, Daniel Kibblesmith, Sam Weiner, Julia Pugachevsky, Nathan W. Pyle, Loryn Brantz, and Matt Bellassai are the funniest writers I’ve had the pleasure of working with.

Thanks to Doree Shafrir, Scott Lamb, and Ben Smith for hiring me, and to Summer Anne Burton and Tommy Wesley for keeping me around. Thanks to Julie Gerstein, the best manager I have ever had in my career. Shout out to Tanner Greenring, Jack Shepherd, Dave Stopera, Matt Stopera, Lauren Yapalater, Dorsey Shaw, and Peggy Wang for creating the voice of BuzzFeed. Thanks to Louis Peitzman, Ashly Perez, Jen Lewis, and Heben Nigatu for making quizzes a thing. Much love to Andrew Ziegler, Sarah Aspler, Alana Mohamed, and all the other mindfreaks.

Thank you to Gavon Laessig for personally giving me the news. Thanks to Lisa Tozzi and her army of reporters who do their best to make the world a little better. Thank you to all of the designers and developers and data folks who created the best publishing tools a writer could ever ask for. Thanks to everyone who ever enjoyed anything I ever made and shared it with other people.

Vampire Weekend “Harmony Hall”

The first time Ezra Koenig sang “I don’t want to live like this, but I don’t want to die,” it was at the climax of “Finger Back,” on the second side of Modern Vampires of the City. That record was in many ways about the pressure to achieve goals and have experiences on a tight schedule, motivated by a deep fear of aging and the narrowing of one’s options. Every character on the album was terrified that their time was running out, or that they were in some trap they needed to escape.

That line has popped up again in “Harmony Hall,” the first Vampire Weekend single in quite some time. The music is more mellow and graceful, but Koenig’s perspective has shifted. He’s singing about frustration with a complicated world, and the seeming impossibility of separating wealth from power. It’s a song about feeling disillusioned and disappointed, and that phrase – “I don’t want to live like this, but I don’t want to die” – feels even more ambivalent than when he sang it the first time. Is he shrugging it all off? Is he going to try to fight it? In the context of the song, he sounds hopeful as he sings it. I hear it as someone trying to find joy in a world he knows is rigged and unfair.

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Deerhunter “What Happens to People?”

“What Happens to People?” is light and brisk, with a melody that seems to float quickly by on a stiff breeze. Bradford Cox sings with a tone that’s half wistful and half distracted, like a fleeting thought about someone he’s fallen out of touch with has an entirely hijacked his mind. There’s a running theme of passivity through all of Cox’s work, but here it extends out to the whole world – life is a thing that happens to you, people are things that come and go around you. Everything is a chaotic drama that’s spinning on around you, and if you weren’t there, it wouldn’t matter too much. He seems so distant here, this guy on the outside of everyone just looking on as things happen to other people. They fall apart, they give up, they disappear, and there’s nothing he can do for them.

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James Blake “Can’t Believe the Way We Flow”

I always like the love songs that do their best to approximate the feeling the author is experiencing. “Can’t Believe the Way We Flow” is mostly James Blake singing about being perfectly in synch with his girlfriend, while the music softly glitches around him, as if it’s the rest of the world just outside their shared wavelength. It’s sweet and romantic, but makes an odd swerve in the middle as the music seems to abruptly click back to the start and goes off on a more neurotic lyrical tangent before returning to the blissful main theme. It’s an unusual decision that breaks the spell of the song, but allows for a deeper context for its sentiment. It’s also a reminder that even in that perfect euphoric flow, this is a guy who’s still very much in his head about this experience.

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Maggie Rogers “The Knife”

The tension in the verses of “The Knife” is subtle and elegant – there’s a swing to the groove, and as the syncopation gets busier the overall effect of the bass and percussion is rather light and slinky. The trick of the song is making you feel comfortable in that groove before moving you into a cathartic release in the chorus that makes you realize in retrospect that you’d been wound so tightly. This is mirrored in the lyrics, in which Maggie Rogers sings about a sudden epiphany that’s rattled her psyche, and about then letting loose on the dance floor. The emphasis of the song both musically and thematically is placed on the verses rather than the chorus, with the heavy implication that the really important thing here is the epiphany, not the release. The release is great, sure, but it’s all about the process leading to the reward.

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Annie Lennox “Little Bird”

“Little Bird” is all endorphins and adrenaline, with Annie Lennox singing about finding a newfound strength and courage in escaping a relationship that had gone sour over an up-tempo track that’s a little bit house and a little bit rock, and sung like a gospel song. Lennox sounds excited and unencumbered, but also rather nervous. Freedom has high stakes, and every note of triumph in this song is shaded by suppressed fear and doubt.

The line in “Little Bird” that resonates most deeply is at the start of the chorus: “They always said that you knew best.” That’s the crucial bit of context, the bit that shows you that this isn’t just about breaking free, it’s about getting out of a cycle of deferring to someone else. This other person doesn’t even need to be a villain, and doesn’t need to have been wrong about everything. The point is that Lennox is singing from the point of view who’s finally decided to trust themselves, and to follow their own path. Lennox’s voice soars on this part – her confidence is rising, but not quite as high as she’d like it to get. But there she is, trying. She makes you want to try too.

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Tune-Yards “Fiya”

What if my own skin makes my skin crawl?
What if my own flesh is suburban sprawl?
What happened between us makes sense
If I am nothing, you’re all
If I’m nothing at all

Those lyrics resonate with me so deeply that it can be hard for me to listen when Merrill Garbus sings it. I know so many songs, and almost none of them express this feeling, and it’s a feeling that is so common. For a long time, I just figured “Fiya” was a rare and special song. But now it seems more like a song that should be common but is not because the music industry has done such a great job of keeping anyone remotely fat out of the spotlight. The few fat people who do make it through are either the type of people who possess a superhuman level of confidence – not exactly common among fat people – or are like me, and do everything they possibly can in life to misdirect your attention and not address this fact of their existence.

But here’s Merrill Garbus actually singing about it, and all the deep-rooted shame and insecurity that goes with it, and the way people – even good, kind people – will (often unknowingly) reduce your value and humanity because you are fat. She’s giving voice to the feeling that bothers me the most: The notion that someone could only want you out of convenience, and that every good thing about you can be cancelled out by your fatness. She’s singing about the cynicism and fear that grows inside you, the entirely justifiable suspicion that everyone you meet thinks you are disgusting unless they prove otherwise. And even then, can you really trust them? But all of that is really just the outside layer of the song. The core of it is a gnawing feeling of loneliness and yearning for affection. It’s disappointment, and resignation to the belief that you’ll never get what you need the way you are.

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My Chemical Romance “Teenagers”

I would have loved this song when it came out in the mid-00s, but I didn’t ever listen to it because I’d decided that My Chemical Romance and most of their mainstream emo MySpace rock peers were not worth my attention. I was in my mid-20s, was distancing myself from most rock music, and incredibly dismissive of the tastes of white suburban American kids. In other words, at the time “Teenagers” was released, teenagers scared the living shit out of me. But I hear it now, and I just think about what a fool I was to ignore this. This is exactly the sort of vibrant, catchy rock song I have loved at every stage of my life. Whoops.

“Teenagers” is a glam metal song in goth drag. Reduced to an elevator pitch, it’s Mötley Cüre. Gerard Way sings the song with an exuberant clarity but his lyrics are incredibly ambivalent, shifting back and forth between fear and empathy. It’s mostly the latter – Way is acutely aware of how awful being a teen can be, and his terror is mostly rooted in knowing that it only seems to get worse on kids and the kids seem to just get worse in turn. This is a song about teens in which the constant threat of mass murder is a major factor in growing up, and how the classic psychological tortures of adolescence seem quaint in that context. In Way’s mind, these kids are hardened, desensitized, and ready to snap at any moment. Who wouldn’t be scared of ‘em, even when they’re your target audience?

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Billy Joel “The Longest Time”

Billy Joel’s music was so omnipresent through my childhood that it took me a very long time to understand that his primary mode as a songwriter was pastiche. It’s pretty obvious! But you know, it’s easy to lose context when something is so foundational for you. With this in mind, it occurs to me that the contemporary artist with the most in common with Joel is actually Stuart Murdoch from Belle & Sebastian. Like Joel, Murdoch is skilled in adapting his natural gift for classic melody to a variety of pop modes from the past, but keeping it all within an immediately apparent personal aesthetic. But whereas Billy Joel’s music is rooted in bitterness and cynicism, Murdoch consistently writes from an empathetic and optimistic point of view.

“The Longest Time” is from An Innocent Man, the Billy Joel album most overtly based in pastiche. Each song on the record was written to evoke a different major influence from Joel’s youth, and this song in particular was a tribute to doo-wop. Joel is very well suited to the style, and the song is built around one of his loveliest and most elegant set of melodies. The most interesting thing about “The Longest Time” is that it’s written in the style of songs that were intended to express very sweet and naive sentiments about romance for an audience of teenagers, but he’s approaching that subject matter from the perspective of a man in his mid-30s. The guy in this song has fallen in love, but is surprised that this has happened – he’s been burned before, he’s had his defenses up for a while. But somehow he’s met someone who truly inspires him and shakes him out of a cynical, self-defeating rut. Joel’s lyrics are sincerely romantic, but cautious in its optimism. He’s absolutely smitten, and just trying extremely hard not to screw up a good thing.

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Billy Joel “Captain Jack”

The lyrics of “Captain Jack” are written in the second person, a technique that is almost always going to result in a creepy, uncomfortable feeling for the listener. You can hear this two ways: Billy Joel is either putting you in the experience of a young, privileged kid who has become a junkie, or he’s putting you in the mind of someone observing a young, privileged kid who has become a junkie and harshly judging them from a distance. Either way, the lyrics hijack your own perspective, so the seedy details and pathetic behavior come off a little more unsettling than they would if they were sung in either the first or third person. There’s an itchy feeling to the song – “ugh, get me out of here, this is gross” alternating with “ugh, get this voice out of my head.”

“Captain Jack” is a fairly early Billy Joel composition that sets the tone for a lot of the songs he would write as he progressed through his career. Musically, he’s merging the aesthetics of ’60s rock with the drama and grandeur of musical theater, and is basically on the same page as his contemporaries Andrew Lloyd Webber and Pete Townshend, and several years ahead of Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf. Lyrically, he’s 23 years old and already revealing himself to be a major curmudgeon with a defensive contempt for “cool” guys of every kind. The lyrics of “Captain Jack” are hectoring and pitiless, and seem to be written deliberately to humiliate his subjects and reveal them as pretentious frauds who are merely dabbling with a down-and-out lifestyle. In this song, and in many Joel hits, the implication is that he’s watching some guy and seething: “Oh, you think you’re better than me? YOU think you’re better than ME? Well, fuck you, buddy!”

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Coldplay “Clocks”

Chris Martin only wants to make everyone’s life feel more meaningful and romantic, and I think that’s a noble pursuit. The best Coldplay songs – and “Clocks” is the best of them all – blend the uplifting dynamics of classic U2 with the yearning and sentimentality of glossy rom-coms. It’s always cinematic and grand, because you’re supposed to hear it and feel like you’re suddenly in some beautiful moment in a movie about your life. This can be sappy, and it can be narcissistic. But in most contexts, a Coldplay song is empathetic and generous in spirit. It’s Martin and his band giving you permission to let your emotions and experiences feel important, even when everything else in the world is telling you that you’re insignificant and boring.

A song like “Clocks” is at its most powerful when you hear it unintentionally in a mundane context, like if you’re at a Panera Bread in a strip mall on an overcast Tuesday afternoon at 3 pm. You need that grandeur and romanticism to feel a little incongruous with your surroundings. That glorious piano melody tells you that you’re living something bigger and more colorful than where you happen to be in the moment. The falsetto chorus, with Martin repeating the ambiguous phrase “you are,” could be an affirmation, or maybe a declaration of love. It can be anything you need it to be as long as it makes you feel like it truly matters.

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Sophie B. Hawkins “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover”

“Damn, I Wish Your Lover” is the ultimate example of how if your big chorus hook is easy to relate to, you can say absolutely bonkers nonsense in the verses and most people won’t notice or care. And like, it’s not the actual premise of the song that is particularly weird – Sophie B. Hawkins is singing about pining for a woman trapped in an abusive relationship – but that she articulates this with colorful, mind-boggling phrases like “I give you something sweet each time you come inside my jungle book.” This is not a complaint, by the way! I think it’s better for songs to embrace strange language. It’s usually more musical, and songs with odd turns of phrase tend to stick out in your head more than a song with bland, prosaic lyrics. It’s a big part of popular music. There’s a certain thrill in paying attention to a song and going “WTF? Come inside her jungle book??”

But again, the verses aren’t really what you’re here for. This song is an expertly crafted chorus delivery system, and anyone who has ever experienced the feeling of lust can click into Hawkins belting out the title phrase. At some points in the song she swaps out “damn” for a wholesome, demure “shucks!” and that sort of dorkiness only makes the song more resonant. It’s unguarded, it’s sweet, it’s self-effacing. There’s no pride in this song, just someone laying it all on the line and owning a desire they figure is entirely futile. But the feeling is there, and it’s got to be expressed somehow or she’ll lose her mind. There’s a desperation here too, as if by writing and singing this song, it’s a last ditch attempt to push this feeling from unrequited to reciprocated. She wants to be a hero to this woman and get her out of a bad situation, but it’s more like she’s hoping she can rescue her from loneliness and humiliation.

Buy it from Amazon.