Portions for Foxes: Bat for Lashes

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

The one-person band is a modern thing, I think. Since the '60s or '70s, there have been multi-instrumentalists, musicians who could do everything - and sometimes did - but they needed to be famous first to get the time and space and resources to construct their music. Since the rise of easy home recording and powerful computing, the bar is much lower - any visionary with a quiet room and a song in her head can make it real.

That's a good thing, of course. More creators, more songs, more ideas, more diversity. Single-person bands are the best kind of quirky, with one vision undiluted by second thoughts or uncertain collaborators.

Bat for Lashes is, I think, that kind of band - it's one woman, Natasha Khan. She's made at least five records over the past decade and a half. The song I want to talk about here is from her first record, back in 2007: Trophy.

It's a complex metaphor, one that I don't have the answers for:

The trophy that I made for us
In fur and gold
Got into the wrong pair of hands
And truth was sold

The "trophy" is something the singer made, special to her and one other person, and it was "sold" or "bought" away, before she retrieves it later.

Most of the comments on the song assume this is sexual: that the character in the song was coerced or tricked into something, that it's a reference to virginity, things along those lines. That doesn't seem quite right to me: it's deeply personal, but also a thing that can be bought, sold or stolen. And a thing that has independent existence, that can come back to its owner.

Mercy this and mercy that
Let justice prevail
But I just want my trophy back
It's not for sale

I default to assuming things like this are about music, or another creative activity, when they're by musicians - that's the creation they're most connected to, the kinds of "property" they care most about, the things that are personal and not for sale.

That may be right; that may be wrong. A good song is one you can listen to, over and over, teasing out meanings and thinking about it. This one puts those lyrics - quietly sung, in a low tone, by Khan - mostly over a similarly quiet hand-clappy rhythm track and minimal instrumentation. It's mostly the voices, Khan's and some background, and that clapping and what sounds like a tambourine. It's enough for a whole universe of possibilities.