Portions for Foxes: Jenny Lewis

"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.

I seem to be using a lot of obscure songs in this series - well, this one isn't. It was a single only a few years ago, by a major artist, and many of you will already be familiar with it. (I think. I hope. The world of music is so fragmented and separated these days that it can be hard to say what anyone has heard, or knows.)

This week, it's Heads Gonna Roll by Jenny Lewis, a storytelling song about all of our inevitable deaths, and related things.

There are three verses. They're all addressed to someone - I have no idea if it's the same someone each time. I think so; that would make sense - but songs can mean many things, can be structured many ways.

Each verse is about the singer doing something, with different people, different places - you can think of them as moments from a jet-setting life, I suppose, but they're vague and separate enough that it doesn't come across that way. And then we hit the chorus, which feels like it's on a different level, more serious and stark:

Heads gonna roll, baby
Everybody's gotta pay that toll and maybe
After all is said and done
We'll all be skulls
Heads gonna roll

Whose heads? Why? Lewis isn't going to say, but I think it's all heads. All of us: her, the man she's singing to, the people in each verse, random people everywhere. It's not "heads gonna roll" in the usual active sense - that someone is going to do something to cause mayhem - but in the inevitable, Memento Mori sense.

It's a slow song, but not a dirge. It celebrates life, I guess, in its odd way, with its odd details from Lewis's life. It's a song that says "here's some things I did, and something about how they made me feel. I want to remember that now, since I'll be dead someday." And that's worth remembering, worth being part of.

Because the same is true for every one of us.