Nettles

The lead single, and the record’s emotional center of gravity. Devotion and dread arrive together. Ethel imagines an accident at the plant, a piece of shrapnel, the slow flicker of hospital light, and the whole future folds into one anxious question. How much time is left, and whether the race to grow up was ever worth the running.

The nettle is the song’s governing image, a plant that stings the hand reaching for it. To love Ethel, the chorus decides, is to suffer her, and she has made an uneasy peace with being painful to hold. She wants to bleed the way boys are allowed to bleed, to be wounded openly and have it count for something. Brown eyes look blue, and the picture on the wall that frightens him turns out to be himself. It is a love song that already knows how the loving ends, and chooses it anyway.