As you can imagine, I listen to a lot of music. I’m the managing editor of this blog, which means that I’m the one who goes through our Submithub queue and decides which songs to feature. The number of submissions vary, but it’s usually somewhere between twenty and forty songs a day, sometimes going up to fifty. In addition to that, I listen to music on my own time, exploring new releases as well as older stuff, listening to as wide a variety as I can. I love my job, and I love exploring music, but it does mean there’s not a lot I haven’t heard before.
There are two kinds of songs we like to feature here at Two Story Melody. There are songs that take familiar forms and use familiar tropes, and succeed because they execute them perfectly or do just enough new to catch the ear. Then there are the songs that catch me off-guard. These are the songs that do something so strange, or approach their genre at such a different angle, that I stop whatever I’m doing and go back to the Submithub tab to read more about it. These are the songs that make me go “hold on, what the hell is this?”
I fucking love these songs. And “lie to me,” by Whitten and Williams, is one of them.
The first strange thing about “lie to me” is the creative process behind it. The project, you see, is not technically called “Whitten and Williams,” but “Whitten and.” Jon Whitten, a British-born, German-based musician who played dulcimer on an alt-J album, uses the project to set poems to music, and the poet’s name follows the “and.” In the case of “lie to me,” that’s a reclusive American poet mononymously known as Williams, who wrote a strange, affecting set of lyrics that Whitten did…something to.
In a press release, Whitten described “lie to me” as an attempt to sound like Rosalía: “a love letter, poorly spelled in enthusiastic crayon.” Even at her strangest, Rosalía has never sounded quite like this: here, a ukulele is strummed like a flamenco guitar, and Whitten harmonizes with what I assume is a pitched-up recording of his own voice. The hooks are great, and the lyrical sentiment would fit right in on El mal querer, but its insular, four-in-the-morning atmosphere makes it feel odd and unfamiliar. But that’s part of what makes “lie to me” so captivating. If the average Rosalía song is a blockbuster action movie, “lie to me” is like its Hong Kong remake: scrappier, weirder, yet somehow just as effective.
The song starts with those harmonized vocals, Whitten’s voice showing fluidity even in its pitch-shifted form: the way he sings the word “night” practically dances in the air. There’s a call-and-response in the chorus, demanding their lover tell them they love them even if they don’t mean it: “Lie to me/Do it sweetly.” After the chorus, the song’s brisk pace slows for Whitten to reflect. Over spare strums, he sings of “swaying back and forth between sleepy and weepy,” plainly admitting his emotional dependency. “I don’t understand how it hurts you,” he says, and that admission speaks volumes of the narrator’s unhealthy relationship with love. It’s great songwriting with or without the idiosyncratic presentation, but it’s the presentation that takes it from good to great.
