AROUND U - LIVE AT THE GREEK THEATRE IN LOS ANGELES (6.27.25)

🚨🚨🚨MUSIC EMERGENCY POST🚨🚨🚨

I have so many other things I should be writing and publishing right now but this literally happened TODAY and I’m absolutely losing my mind about it. HELP. So I’m writing something short in real time. NOBODY CARES ABOUT THIS AS MUCH AS I DO AND THAT IS OKAY. MY BLOG MY RULES.

PICTURE THIS: me, tipsy in my kitchen at 2:59AM TODAY after getting home from heartbreak catch-up drinks with my therapist friend, sandals off, leather jacket still on, tapping through Instagram stories while deciding whether to make night pasta. The clock struck 3. I think. I wasn’t really paying attention. All I know is I tapped to MUNA’s story and saw a link had been posted three seconds ago. I clicked.

Girl… when I saw this… when I HEARD this………. I literally slid down my kitchen cabinets to the GROUND.

I would swear I’d never plan again, but I can see the irony

I’m humbled by the passing of time

I am brought down onto my knees.

MUNA’s live album was released almost a year ago, on June 28, 2024. Many fans, myself included, noticed that “Around U” wasn’t on the track list, despite being performed at the show. The rest of the record is incredible and such a gift to all the gay people who don’t live in LA, so I couldn’t be too mad, but still. “Around U” is my favorite MUNA song to hear live. I go to their concerts to hear “Around U” live. It never enters my On Repeat because I usually prefer to play a live recording from a show on YouTube instead of streaming the studio version. I don’t hate the studio version by any means, but it’s nearly impossible to hear Naomi’s vocal harmonies on the final chorus. To me, this is a vital part of the song. Their voice is stunning. The harmony itself and Naomi’s performance of it both bring the entire narrative of the song full-circle. And you can only hear them live, which means only in someone’s shaky iPhone video from the pit.

UNTIL NOW, BITCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As of today, you can hear those sweet, sweet harmonies and Katie’s yodeling outro (also a live version exclusive) in crisp, clear, full-volume production wherever you get your music. I USED TO PRAY FOR DAYS LIKE THIS.

Oh my god. This song. The lyrics. The LORE. The intricate rituals.

I KNOW THEY’RE INTRICATE. (pc Moriah Berger)

It’s now public knowledge that MUNA members Katie Gavin and Naomi McPherson used to date (and I’ve written about it extensively on the blog before, so I’ll just summarize for the unfamiliar). Their relationship precedes the band, and their breakup coincided with MUNA’s first record deal. Naomi and Katie were not on speaking terms at this point, but for the band’s sake they pressed forward with the album, emailing song files back and forth. Otherwise they were entirely no contact. I find this story fascinating and deeply lesbian. Whether you’re Naomi producing such emotionally cutting songs written by your recent ex, some of which are (ahem) About You, or Katie repeatedly exposing your vulnerabilities and shame around your destructive patterns to your recent ex through song lyrics, it’s not a great scene. It’s the sort of experience that would tear 90% of people apart, but if you’re among the lucky ones willing to do the extreme amount of work and group/band therapy necessary, you’ll emerge on the other side with an unbreakable bond. And an incredible album.

MUNA’s debut album, About U, came out in 2017 and included certified depression bangers “Everything” and “Crying On The Bathroom Floor,” as well as the now-famous “Loudspeaker” and “I Know A Place.” It’s kind of crazy how fucking good it sounds when you consider it was made by two exes and their third friend while the exes weren’t talking to each other. While they’ve always been up-front that Naomi-inspired songs exist on their first two records, the band previously always refused to specify which songs they were. These days, every time they perform “Around U” live, Katie introduces it quite plainly: “This song is about when Naomi and I broke up.”

Katie Gavin is one of my favorite living songwriters. Her lyrics capture flashes of heartbreak through hyper-specific, concrete imagery, something I try to emulate in my own work. Her mastery is on display from the first verse of “Around U”:

An Arizona Half-and-Half. A half a pack of cigarettes. A vacant lot. My tangled thoughts. Suburbia give me my god again.

All senses say nothing has changed. The soft lines from the streetlight fall the same on my face…

Naomi’s production encases Katie’s words in pure resonance, creating a mid-album emotional knockout. I sometimes imagine what it must have felt like for Naomi to receive the vocal files for this song, a mournful yet firm severance of the connection between the two of them, then be tasked with bringing it to life. Giving it a beat, a pulse, a heart.

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I discovered About U in June 2018. I was eighteen years old and depressed in Connecticut. I was living in an ancient dorm with no AC for a summer research program. I was undoubtedly the stupidest person there. I worked in a microbiology lab beneath an ice-cold grad student who made it clear she resented having to teach me anything. In December, two days before my eighteenth birthday, I was broken up with for the first time. We only “dated” for a week, and only kissed once, but there were three months of codependent acceleration preceding this. Three months of true, beautiful friendship that I do look back on fondly for what they were, that I now regret firebombing with my desire. But what was I supposed to do with the charge? What do you do when someone strips the wire until it sparks and then forces it into your hand?

When you are seventeen and so lonely and you’ve never had a real friend before, a real best friend, and then you finally meet your person, and you talk about Faulkner and Ocean Vuong and dance to Carly Rae Jepsen, and you share writing with each other, and you stargaze in the courtyard of the dorm next to yours, and she texts you “dinner tn???” almost every night, and she tells you You’re a sunset, and you bring her to your childhood home and take her to see Lady Bird at the tiny indie theater in town where they have nutritional yeast for the popcorn instead of butter and she douses your shared popcorn bucket and by the time the movie ends you’re both crying and when you walk out an elderly woman stops you and says You girls are just like the two of them. The friends from the movie, and she sometimes holds your hand when she’s drunk and you’re walking home from the party where you were too scared to kiss her,

this can all feel like it means something.

The house still stands where it was built, I know cause I drove by tonight

A candle in the bedroom where I once performed a holy rite

and I did stop to hang my head just for a moment at the light, cause now the altar is a bed, and now you’re just a friend that once was mine.

Every day that summer, while walking to lab in the mornings, walking to the food trucks on Sachem St, walking to meet my friends and their completely intact hearts at their off-campus apartments, walking walking walking in the thick wet heat of New Haven to nowhere, just into the lush East Rock green until I got dizzy and my vision shimmered, I listened to “Around U” on repeat. This was before I knew the lore behind it, back when it was just a soundtrack to my own lore.

Life comes at you fast. Before you know it you are eighteen and you are depressed in Connecticut and you’re sitting across from a friend that once was yours in an off-campus café and she corrects you. Nothing, it meant nothing, none of it, not to her.

I knew it couldn’t be true. It couldn’t all be explained away. It just couldn’t. I had given her plenty of chances to back out. I’d encouraged it. She didn’t want to admit it, but she had chosen everything, every step of the way.

The situationship economy is destroying the sanity of our nation’s lesbians. It’s a strategy to keep our desire to give and receive tenderness in check. It’s a form of self-gaslighting, a way to shame ourselves for having feelings for another person, or for wasting any time feeling hurt by how they treat us. We all buy into it anyway, myself included, enthusiastic as lemmings plunging off a cliff en masse. My generation in particular is label-obsessed in most other aspects, but when it comes to clarity on sexual entanglements, we’d rather avoid the subject entirely. If we don’t define the parameters of our relationship, if we aren’t Labeled anything, no matter how much our behavior might align with the behavior typically associated with said label, we can’t possibly be accountable to whatever hurt we might cause the other person. Technically, we’re nothing.

How do you grieve nothing?

Something massive happened here. You can feel it in the atmosphere. Something false that once was true. I no longer revolve around you.

Something massive. That’s as close as you can ever get, sometimes, to understanding what it was. All those weeks, all that rising tension. Fingers interlocking. Shoulders bumping. Thighs pressed flush against each other. Eye contact across the room. Potential energy. Nothing more. Something massive. These are all the words you ever get. Even these will be doubted. Suffocated. Denied. Something massive. Like a supernova. Like riding a bike down a hill and opening your arms to the wind and closing your eyes. Like the volcanic heat rising in your body. Something massive. Something you’ll never touch. Something you kill yourself trying to grab at anyway. Something massive, as close as you will ever come to something real. Over and over and over again. It started then, in that heartbroken summer of green. I am beginning to make peace with the fact that it will never stop.

Something massive happened here.

Again.

Something massive happened here.

Again.

You can’t figure it out, Finn says to the narrator in Women. Stop trying to figure it out.

I don’t believe in affirmations or power poses or meditation but when I fall from grace again I pull up a live video of “Around U” on YouTube and I sing the final line of the chorus and I pretend like I mean it. I scream it like a spell. I so badly need for it to be true: I no longer revolve around you.

Schrodinger’s situationship: until you label the box, the relationship inside is both alive and dead.

Oh civilian, idling along, how can you understand that there’s a whole world gone wrong?

Ultimately, the bridge of “Around U” is the stupid skipping record of my life. The story I try to write a different way, but I always end up back in the same place.

How can I try to be civilized when inside there is a shifting paradigm? And everything we built, we built on our love. Everything is spinning on the one assumption. How can I try to say sorry when my words don’t carry the same gravity? And everything I say, I say it knowing full well you still don’t want to believe

that something massive happened here.

It hurts to be the earnest one. It hurts to be the optimist, the chaser of the feeling, the lover of the journey no matter the destination. It hurts to watch my desire become the source of someone else’s fear. It hurts to be minimized for the sake of someone else’s narrative. Over and over, what am I to you? Always an angel, never a god. My lovers never want to believe. They think belief asks too much of them. They think I want too much, I am too much. I am starting to think this is true. Chloé says people like us shine too brightly. People either run from it or try to stamp it out. The best option, the only option, is to be alone. Let people come and leave as they may (and they will). Stop begging. Stop fighting. There’s no convincing someone out of their terror, no matter how badly you want them to be brave.

In the newly-released live recording of “Around U,” the distinct layers of synth and guitar and bass and drum line and keys are crystal clear. The sound is more balanced and expansive than the studio version. Finally, finally, I can hear Naomi come in on the final chorus, right after the bridge, right here—

But you can feel it in the atmosphere—

and my heart aches with envy for how healing it must be to get to a place where they can sing this together, where they can let the crowd hear how they hurt each other—

Something false that once was true—

and finally come together for one final release, setting themselves free together, the lyrical irony not lost on me as their voices entwine around each other in perfect harmony, in the same way their lives and music have merged, their fates destined to intersect, their bodies built to orbit each other—

I no longer revolve around you.

I no longer revolve around you.

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Meme corner

@aliiithompson#muna #whereismuna #katiegavin #josettemaskin #naomimcpherson

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