Hi Reader ! How you been lately?

I’m very excited to write to you again! In case you didn’t notice, Let’s Talk Songs didn’t come out over the last three months. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been listening to music or writing about it. It just means I didn’t have it in me to sit down and do the hard work. So much work goes into making this newsletter.

These past few months I’ve been traveling a lot. I spent some time in London, then Barcelona, then went to New York to see Real Estate play. I even got to see them in Woodstock, which I still can't believe it actually happened and is not a dream my mind made up. After that, my homeward flight was canceled and I decided to extend my trip a few weeks and spend some time in Indiana. I only flew back to Barcelona to play a Halloween gig with my band Grandma’s Church. I also had a dear friend visiting from Vienna and staying with me. Any free time I had, which wasn’t much, I wanted to spend with her rather than writing. Now I’m in Berlin, where I’ve been for the last three weeks, and in a few days I’ll be boarding a plane to Los Angeles.

As you can imagine, there isn’t much time to write when you’re constantly moving countries and exploring new places, or when you’re practicing for a concert on top of having a job and keeping up with basic adult tasks.

I’m not complaining. I’m very aware of my privilege and grateful that I get to live this life. But in that context, writing this newsletter started to feel like another chore on my to do list, and I began to resent it. I never want Let’s Talk Songs to become a source of dread. This is my passion project. It is made with passion or it is not made at all. Hence the break.

Still, I kept writing here and there whenever a song excited me enough. That is how this newsletter started in the first place.

So here is Issue 7, finally out in the world. What you’re about to read is a compilation of notes on songs I’ve been listening to or thinking about over the last few months.

As a bonus, here's another playlist I made with the songs that were playing during my time in New York and Indiana. Some were played by me to others and some were played to me by them. Some were sung in karaoke, and some were slow danced to at midnight.

Thank you for sticking around. I missed this feeling.

Let’s talk soon ✨

Fiorella.-

Now hit play and listen : ) Issue #7 💌 • Fiorella Lucia Take It As It Comes • Vivian... PREVIEW   ​ And remember you can listen to all the previous issues in one single playlist here​

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A female artist

Take it as it comes by Vivian Girls (2011)

I was over the moon when I found out Vivian Girls are reuniting to play a few shows. They might even come to Europe in 2026. I don’t remember how I discovered them (it was probably the YouTube algorithm) but I do remember the moment of my life: 2012, the year I was accepted into film school, best year of that decade, top 3 best year of my life. I was living with my grandma, watching a lot of movies, smoking a lot of weed, and every guy I liked liked me back.

Vivian Girls is a band from New Jersey, the place where most of my favourite things come from: Real Estate, The Adventures of Pete & Pete, and my bff Jenny. The band formed when best friends Katy and Cassie started playing music together in their early twenties. In Take It As It Comes, they do what bffs do: give each other ✨love advice✨.

The song is a conversation between the two friends. Katy is hooked on a guy who isn’t showing interest in her, so she turns to Cassie for advice. And what does Cassie tell her to do?

She tells her what someone should have told all of us, the advice we should have received the day we turned 14:

You’ll never get a guy

If you chase a guy down too

You’ll never get a guy

If your heart always tells you what to do

You’ve gotta think with your head, don’t act with your heart

If you ever want a love so true

And then she tells her that “to find true love, you gotta first live life yourself”.

In a world full of songs that tell you to “listen to your heart”, “follow your feelings” and “let love be the guiding force”, it’s so refreshing to hear a song that sounds like the realistic advice your friend would give you.

Shout out to the music video, which is an homage to teen movies from the 80s, Pretty in Pink style. Cassie and Katy talk on the phone from their 80s teen bedrooms, there’s a split screen moment, it’s really cool. I remember showing the video to my friend Dano and joking about how I was Katy and she was Cassie, not only because I’d turn to her whenever I had boy trouble, but also because she’s blonde like Cassie and I’m a redhead like Katy. They were literally so us.

Either a guy or a band

Wisconsin by Steven Van Betten (2023)

Steven Van Betten’s first LP Friends and Family has been in heavy rotation on my Spotify, but also in my head when I’m not listening to anything at all. It feels like the perfect soundtrack for that sweet spot between summer and autumn, also known as ✨ late September ✨.

I walked home from Sagrada Familia listening to Please Drive Safe. I rode my bike along the beach trying to remember all the lyrics to Ideal Day. I walked back home after band practice singing Surrounded by All These Beautiful People I Love under my breath.

I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car in Indiana, gazing out the window while the hand of a sweet man was resting on my thigh, and even though all I could see were endless cornfields rushing by, I also saw, as if in a double exposed image (or should I say movie?), the family reunion from the song Wisconsin.

I love this song for two main reasons. First, I’m a deeply nostalgic person. In Wisconsin, Steven recounts scenes from a weekend spent with his extended family when he was a kid or a teenager.

A family reunion of everyone I’ve never met,

the faces I remember but the names I all forget.

Twenty three people I share blood with were staying at the house.

The second reason is that this song reminds me of the books I like to read. They aren’t plot based. They linger in moments, not events. Steven is a wonderful storyteller, yet the story he tells here isn’t driven by action but by images. In Wisconsin he gives us snapshots from a weekend in his life. I can’t really relate, I don’t have a family lol, but when he sings about men yelling at the TV, women drinking wine on the patio, kids trapping fireflies in mason jars, I feel like I’m right there. It becomes my family, my childhood, and I want to cry a little.

This song is a cool kid with glasses

Expert in a dying field by The Beths (2022)

NOTE: The text you’re about to read mentions a conversation about Spotify and their highly unethical business model. This conversation took place in early September, before even more light was shed on all the shit Spotify is doing. I’m switching to Tidal next month and I encourage you to do the same.

I hadn’t seen my friend E. in a while, so last week I was really looking forward to meeting her for coffee and cake. I was surprised to learn that she didn’t know about my newsletter, considering I feel like I talk about it constantly and post about it all the time.

We ended up talking about music, AI generated bands, and the ways we each try to engage with music more intentionally. She told me that this year she decided to start listening to albums front to back and taking notes in an Excel document. I recommended Dog Tale by Tugboat Captain and shared a commitment I made: if a band I listen to a lot plays near me, I have to go see them and buy their album at the merch stall. Having unlimited access to music for basically nothing, knowing how little artists get paid per stream, and how expensive making music actually is makes me uncomfortable. I don’t think art made by artists who are still alive should be free, so buying an album or a t shirt directly from them feels like the least I can do.

I told her that The Beths were playing in Barcelona in November, and she said it’s a very Fiorella band. The funny thing is that at least three other people have told me the exact same thing. We talked about their song Expert in a Dying Field, since it was the only one we both had in mind at that moment, but I quickly realised I had no idea what the song was actually about. I only had a vague sense of the melody.

To be honest, the title always makes me think of translators. A couple of my friends are translators, and we’ve often talked about how translation is a dying field. They are literally experts in a dying field.

But of course, this song isn’t about translators losing their jobs to AI. It’s about losing a person you’ve become an expert in.

Love is learned over time 'til you're an expert in a dying field.

My favourite lines are:

And I can close the door on us but the room still exists. And I know you're in it.

It made me think of my last boyfriend, someone I honestly hadn’t thought about in ages. Yet two years after our breakup I can still recall so many useless facts about him. I know how he takes his coffee. I can name his top three videogames. I know his favourite snacks, and the population of the tiny rural town he grew up in (3,923 inhabitants). I’m an expert in this person who now isn’t so much a dying field as he is ✨ ancient history ✨.

It doesn’t hurt. It just annoys me. I wish that space in my brain were used for something useful, like remembering how to properly clean my coffee machine, the fastest way to get from Stansted Airport to central London, or the correct export settings in Photoshop so printed colours come out right. But no. My brain prefers to remember the exact spot where my ex is missing a tooth and the entire sequence of events that led to him losing it.

Ugh. Brains are so stupid.

Hours of phrases I've memorized, thousands of lines on the page. All of my notes in a desolate pile I haven't touched in an age.

And I can burn the evidence but I can't burn the pain. And I can't forget it.

You know this artist, maybe not this song

Ivy by Taylor Swift (2021)

I was in NYC when Taylor Swift released her new album The Life of a Showgirl. The exact moment it dropped, I was in an Uber with a friend. We were riding back to my apartment in the Upper East Side after a night of Halloween cartoons and all you can eat cereal bowls in Brooklyn. The driver had iHeartRadio on, and I heard a familiar voice singing a song I didn’t recognize. That’s when I told my friend, “oh, this must be Taylor Swift’s new album.” I added that now I would always remember hearing it for the first time with him, riding in an Uber with the city lights glowing through the left side window as we drove along the East River. I immediately felt like an idiot for saying something so sentimental, so I also told him that even though I’m not a swifty, I remember that the day I moved to London was the day she released Folklore, and how much I love that album and Evermore. I told him how I was in my old Barcelona apartment packing a carry on suitcase while listening to those songs, and how surreal it felt that my first real connection to her music happened right before moving to Highgate, the north London neighbourhood where she happened to be living at the time. That summer I made so many jokes about running into Taylor Swift at Tesco!

Thinking about all that made me revisit those two albums, how I prefer Evermore, and how my favourite song from it is Ivy. To be honest, the thing I love most about Ivy is the plucky instrumental arrangement at the four minute mark, the last twenty seconds, the outro. Aaron Dessner produced the track and he is so good at creating images with sound. To me, the music feels like running through a forest in autumn. But since this is a newsletter about lyrics and not instrumental landscapes, I’ll stay focused.

Ivy tells the story of a married woman stuck in a dull marriage who falls for another man and then damns him for turning her life upside down:

Oh goddamn, my pain fits in the palm of your freezing hand taking mine, but it’s been promised to another. Oh, I can’t stop you putting roots in my dreamland. My house of stone, your ivy grows and now I’m covered in you.

The first verse describes beautifully the surprise of this person for finding herself in love again.

How’s one to know I’d meet you where the spirit meets the bones in a faith forgotten land?

In from the snow your touch brought forth an incandescent glow, tarnished but so grand…

My favourite lines are:

And the old widow goes to the stone every day.

But I don’t, I just sit here and wait... grieving for the living.

I like how Taylor writes about the idea of a love that has died while the person themselves is still alive. It leaves you with no clear place to grieve, no socially acceptable ritual the way there would be if someone had passed away. Instead, you’re left mourning something intangible. You sit with the grief of a feeling that no longer exists, rather than the loss of the person themselves.

Shout out to Tay-Tay.

My discovery of the month

In the pines by The Kossoy Sisters (1956)

recently discovered The Kossoy Sisters. Their album Bowling Green and Other Folk Songs from the Southern Mountains kept me company in the early days of autumn when I was in London. I’ve been mostly away from home this year, and while going from one country to another with only my backpack gives me a sense of freedom and adventure, there are moments when I need to feel that, despite living in many houses, I also have a home. Folk music gives me that feeling.

The Kossoy Sisters were a folk duo from New York, formed by identical twins Irene and Ellen. Irene played guitar and sang mezzo-soprano vocals, while Ellen sang soprano harmonies and played banjo. I’m a big a fan of female harmonies, and because of my upcoming gig I’ve been working a lot with them lately so this past month I’ve been especially interested in listening to other female singers harmonizing. It gives me the chance to really study what they do and see what I can borrow.

I wasn’t playing much attention to the lyrics until today, when I was laying in bed after lunch, recovering from a long day and a long weekend. My computer was next to me so it was easy to just read the lyrics. I was playing the song In the pines, the lyrics reading:

Little girl, little girl

Where’d you stay last night?

Not even your mother knows

“I stayed in the pines where the sun never shines

Shivered where the cold winds blowed”

I had a HOLD ON A SECOND moment. Not only were the lyrics connected to Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, but the melody was the same, I just hadn’t noticed until then. Still, it wasn’t the same song. Like probably all of us, my first contact with Where Did You Sleep Last Night? was through Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged. I always knew it was a cover, and I’ve listened to what I thought was the original version many times. So what was this?

It turns out In the Pines is a folk song of unknown authorship, believed to be a fusion of two older songs: In the Pines and The Longest Train (hence the lyric, “his head was found in a driving wheel.”) When I was in primary school, our music teacher explained that folk music got its name because these songs were passed down from one folk to another before recordings existed. Over the years, different artists have taken verses from In the Pines and created their own versions. It’s basically music and lyrics in the public domain. I encourage you to search “In the Pines” on YouTube and listen to all different versions!

From Wikipedia:

Lyrics in some versions about “Joe Brown’s coal mine” and “the Georgia line” may refer to Joseph E. Brown, a former Governor of Georgia, who famously leased convicts to operate coal mines in the 1870s. While early renditions which mention the head in the “driver’s wheel” make clear that the decapitation was caused by the train, some later versions would omit the reference to the train and reattribute the cause. As music historian Norm Cohen pointed out in his 1981 book, Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong, the song came to consist of three frequent elements: a chorus about “in the pines”, a verse about “the longest train” and a verse about a decapitation, but not all elements are present in all versions.

Starting in 1926, commercial recordings of the song were made by various country artists. In her 1970 Ph.D. dissertation, Judith McCulloh found 160 permutations of the song. As well as rearrangement of the three frequent elements, the person who goes into the pines, or who is decapitated, is described as a man, woman, adolescent, husband, wife, or parent, while the pines can be seen as representing sexuality, death, or loneliness. The train is described as killing a loved one, as taking one’s beloved away, or as leaving an itinerant worker far from home.

The folk version by the Kossoy Sisters asks, “Little girl, little girl, where’d you stay last night? Not even your mother knows.” The reply to the question, “Where did you get that dress/ And those shoes that are so fine?” from one version is, “From a man in the mines/Who sleeps in the pines.”

I thought the album cover was cool, but now I understand it too!

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