Janie

The record opens in the summer Ethel turns sixteen, the season her only real friend gets a boyfriend and begins, gently and without malice, to drift. What starts as ordinary teenage jealousy hardens into something older and more frightening. To be loved, she becomes convinced, is always to be left, and the leaving has already begun before the love is even spoken aloud.

Across the song Ethel moves between provocation and plea, daring Janie to hurt her and get it over with, then begging her in the same breath to leave one quiet door open. The line she keeps returning to, that Janie was hers first, is less an argument than a child’s claim on the world, a way of insisting the past cannot be revised even as the future closes. It states the album’s thesis before the album has properly begun. She can see the end in the beginning of everything.