In Songbook This Week: "Everything" by Muna
Songwriter(s): Katie Gavin, Josette Maskin & Naomi McPherson
The queer indie trio Muna is distinguished by a bright, synth-pop sound and sharp songwriting, sometimes with a dark edge. “Everything” is a psychologically astute portrait of romantic obsession. It hints at the cost to the fixated person trapped in a bubble for two, in which she can barely imagine her life unless regarded by the loved one. But the notion that her existence has little or no independent value is undermined by the fact that we never actually see the one she loves—it’s as if she is looking in a mirror and seeing only a phantom as her reflection.
Lead singer Katie Gavin’s vocal effortlessly conveys the experience described. This is a total pop song, with music and lyrics combining brilliantly to say something neither could express so well on their own. The words suggest desperation that fully comes through only when set in this particular frame.
In literary terms, the lyrics are an apostrophe, addressing an absent person. Out walking one day, the singer sees “a beautiful girl on the street” who “looked nothing like me, I think” (a nod to low self-esteem and that self-defeating comparison to others that none of us is immune to) and can think only of phoning the person being addressed. She wants to describe the beautiful stranger. But she doesn’t call—the connection has been broken. She then sees the wing of a bird on the road, finds it lovely and sad, and is gripped by the same need to describe it for the one she loves, to see “how you’d find it.” Even the simplest opinions, reactions and feelings need validation from the beloved.
“Everything’s about you to me,” is a repeated line of the chorus, with the melancholy implications coming through in the tune and in the increasing desperation of the singing. Tragic events in the news barely register: “At the bar, on TV, they were talking about the casualties, four hundred and counting, and my only question was, how would you feel if one was me? Would you wish we’d made love again? Would you want to revisit the marks on my skin?” Hard-hitting and conversational lyrics are a Muna specialty.
Absorbed in her almost hypnotic state, the singer is not without self-awareness. “The world could be burning, and all I’d be thinking is, how are you doing, baby?” But she can’t help it. “I’m sorry to be so serious. I know you don’t like my long face.” She is clinging by a tenuous thread to a love that wasn’t all that strong to begin with. “I know you can’t stand me this way, but I took hope in half-desire.”
It’s always sad when someone loves another so much more deeply than she or he is loved in return. “You are wildfire and I’m standing in the rain.” It’s an interesting line, since neither of the two options—burning like wildfire or soaking in rain—sounds sustainable or safe. She is grasping at an incompatible, evidently unobtainable ideal.