Dizzy - Single
Honestly, this is so exciting. The first single off Juliana is “Dizzy,” a nearly perfect pop song that I have had in my head for years. I don’t know how to write this blog post without overexplaining the song, when I really just want you to hear it and absorb it. So let me tell you about a much earlier version of this song.
In college, I went to parties. Groundbreaking! And one time, before a party, these girls wiped glitter on my face so I would sparkle in someone’s dim living room light. For months afterward, I had the line, “you’re wiping glitter all over your face” bouncing in my head with the same cadences as early Broken Social Scene songs (iykyk) reverberating in my head, and had turned it into a pop song that was haunting and sonically glittery— but it wasn’t… fun? The song wasn’t fun the way I wanted. And that’s because I viewed these types of parties as being really oppressive places where I hated my body.
I’ve got a history of body hatred, which informs nearly all of my writing, and as I’ve been dealing with it, my relationship to parties has changed. In college I simply could not enjoy a party sober. Hence, “Glitter” was like a pop dirge to giving in to alcoholism or whatever. Nowadays, I do have a good time sober. It’s not perfect— my friends have to reassure me sometimes when we’re out.
But “Glitter,” as a concept, as using parties as a form of escapism, was a proto-Juliana idea. Six years in the making, I wanted to revisit the idea of going to a party and wanting to escape your own body. That’s subtext, of course— “Get on out there like you’re young and new/And you don’t feel dizzy” is a version of the mantra I would tell myself to become more extroverted at parties despite my body issues. I tell people I’m a shy extrovert. I like being around people, and I get self-conscious quickly.
But, now I had a narrative. A new girl arrived to the city, trying to make friends, trying to be an artistic intellectual. I had a stronger frame than my own experiences to write this song. Suddenly, it’s about a troupe of artists who give Juliana a fun and carefree environment to begin her own escapism. (Juliana, of course, being an escapist fantasy for Beth). This troupe acknowledges that she might be feeling shame, worry, grief, and dizziness, but to “push through it” or ignore it, or else get lost in the melodrama of this new social scene. There’s other stuff in the song, but that’s the gist.
So, what made this song a single in my eyes is that it’s stuck in my head. I am humming it all the time. I also wanted to establish a few major themes for Juliana that Dizzy covers— escapism, melodrama, temporary youth, but most of all reassurance and encouragement. Juliana is a meditation on maladaptive daydreaming, and when you daydream you are reassuring yourself. Dizzy covers a lot of ground in 4 minutes.
And, “Dizzy” picks up where RUSH! left off. “All your life in a pinball game” is a direct quote from Rush II (Climbing Out) from the last record, so it felt like an appropriate way to begin. Let’s come back to that feeling of hitting the same dull ache. How do we do that? Why? For some of us it’s inebriation, and for some of us it’s maladaptive coping skills that replay every memory until it frays. In both cases, the truth feels awful and boring, and the pain or joy of hitting the same spot over and over again keeps you in the loop. How do we deal with that? How do we overcome it?
And, maybe most importantly, do we even want to deal with it?
