This will be nice, I thought. A kind song, drawn up from the well-wishing wishing-well of someone’s heart.
And sweetly, sweetly, Lonely Choir begins, “I hope you get hit by a bus.”
So it’s that kind of song, the kind that lets you know right away the title is ironic. This is a detailed anti-prayer, a precise prescription of poetic justice for someone who has done the singer wrong. The singer’s wish is simple; as Randy Newman puts it, “I want you to hurt like I do.”
But there’s more to the song’s irony than just the tension between title and lyrics.
Consider the singer’s advice in the chorus: “You should pack up your things and move / Find a brunette in France / She won’t know you’re an asshole because she won’t speak your language.” There’s a lovely, flowing rhythm to “she won’t know you’re an asshole.” The beauty of the melody twists against the ugliness of the word in a way that strengthens both.
The sweetness of the instrumental arrangement, too, twists against the bitterness of the lyrics: the warm tones of the fingerpicked acoustic guitar and pizzicato violin, the shimmery, shivery cymbals that predominate in the percussion, and an array of strings and electronic swells that rise over the course of the song like last-light insects in a late summer field.
Irony makes a story more complex. The twist in this one is that the singer curses someone to loneliness – “I don’t want you to die, I just want you to feel alone in the hospital” and “I just want you to feel the pain I felt each time you left me alone to cry” – but that loneliness is where the singer lives (not making any assumptions about Lonely Choir here, despite the name; I’m just talking about the character in the song.) The singer wants her ex to be lonely not just because it hurts, but because that’s how she feels. She wants them to be together in feeling alone, a twisted kind of closeness.
But hidden in the dream of sharing pain is a reminder that people can be together; we can try to imagine how others feel. At the very least we can be interested, and listen. Isn’t that a kindness, to listen to someone tell you how she’s hurting? Especially if you’re the one who hurt her.
The character seems to become aware of this possibility at the end of the song, singing, “Someday I know I’ll be fine / Someday I will find someone kind.” It’s a kindness to end the song on that note. The hope in these last lines is made stronger by the pain of all the preceding lyrics. If the song started out this way, we might think, “Well, how are you so sure?”
But I’m inclined to believe a person who can wade through four minutes of heartbreak and then say she knows she’ll see better days.
