‘I don’t need anyone, I don’t need anyone, I just need everyone and then some’
Is a line from Ashley Nicolette Frangipane’s song Clementine featured on her 2020 album Manic.
Clementine is my favourite track of the 27 other lyrical and fantastical masterpieces of the album. It highlights the human desire for independence and self-sufficiency juxtaposed with the human need for others.
The track focuses on self-deterioration and politely asks if the addressee would carry the speaker during a ‘black out’ or a ‘breakdown’. Both situations possess different connotations; the former, many college students can agree, brings back fond memories of dazed nights out with friends, however the latter naturally connotes solitude and melancholy.
The rest of the Manic album, which can be interpreted as a poetry anthology put to music, runs through a tsunami of different and raw emotions, such as anger and thirst for revenge (as seen in You Should Be Sad and I’m Not Mad), drunken nights spent with a curiously intriguing stranger (Finally // Beautiful Stranger), the fear of falling from fame (SUGA’s Interlude) and drunken mornings spent dwelling on self-hatred and longing for someone’s validation (3 am).
Halsey truly is a master of words and a poet, capable of expressing and singling out common emotion and structuring it in a unique way. In 2020, her poetry anthology entitled ‘I Would Leave Me If I Could’ was released. I have not yet read its contents, however, if I do manage to get my hands on it, it will be a definite purchase.
written by Ashley Allard
Comments