milestones
❤️ ‘𝔤𝔬𝔬𝔡 𝔫𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱’❤️ (yes from 2022) reached a “milestone” today (and yes we know there’s more to music than streaming numbers): 10,000
To think this song, has held the attention of ears 10,000 times is very moving to me. I wrote it in a dorm room in Dublin where I was exploding out of a period of depression, an adventure made possible by a deliberate exile from everyone and everything I had known. it came together slowly, piece by piece, through this time, as a I was packaging up an old world and watching a new one unfurl in front of me. It couldn’t unfold fast enough. And it didn’t: It was, the winter of 2020. Less than three months later, I went from hiking through the hills of Ireland and acquiring a particular taste for Irish blended whiskey in search of my soul to sitting in my childhood bedroom with nothing but screens and exams and a thesis to complete.
‘𝔤𝔬𝔬𝔡 𝔫𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱’ of course was finished before all of that. many think ‘the city’ i sing about is New York City but it’s actually Paris. Right before borders closed and the virus spread across the world, my dearest friend who was on this exile-turned-journey with me, Isabel, and I had plans to spend our break in a tiny town in the south of France. We flew to Paris where we’d spend less than 12 hours before taking a train through France to the coast. We were staying with a friend of a friend, who studying in Paris, lent us his dorm room floor for us to crash on. i dont know if we ever made it to the floor: we holed up in a bar drinking martinis and talking until we had to get to our train, which left before sunrise. At the bar, who knows how many martinis in, my friend of a friend told me that many tourists who come to Paris romanticizing everything get so sick from the actual reality of it, the city had to build a wing in the hospital for people who fell ill when confronted with the truth of the city. And that was it. I had my ending.
We recorded ‘𝔤𝔬𝔬𝔡 𝔫𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱’ so crudely (many years ago) the drums are not even real. We’ve often end special nights with it as it was the first song I was able to work on when coming out of an omnipotent pandemic-induced creative paralysis and thus it was partygirl’s first song. Here it is live, reworked and reimagined from our ep I release show. Maybe we’ll play it again at night club 101 on sept 27…