Portions for Foxes: LP

"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.

We all have artists we love, and sometimes phases in careers we love. It can be disconcerting to look back and think that the phase you love best seems to be the one the artist likes least.

And I hate to say that here, but I think it's true: I think the musician who performs as LP was pushed in one specific direction in her early career. It didn't work, for whatever reason, she regrouped, went away, was mostly a songwriter for a decade, and finally came back to make music that's more of what she wanted to do.

I appreciate that - my wife likes the new stuff better, too! - but her first two records have a sound and an emotion in their best songs that she hasn't touched since. There's what I think is one album worth of absolutely killer material, from the two releases and a few oddities, interspersed with less-ambitious and successful songs.

I could have picked any of four songs for this - as I type this, I'm still wondering if I'm going to change my mind. But it's not the operatic, touching Suburban Sprawl & Alcohol. It's not the happier-than-you'd-expect Wasted.

No, I think it's going to be a song of need and longing: All I Have.

I had a dream last night and you were walking all alone
I couldn't reach you and you slipped away into the crowd
Now all I have is a photo of you smiling at me
All I want is you here with me and I'll be happy

I think one of the things that her handlers pushed LP into, in that first phase of her career, was burying the fact that she sings love songs to and about women - there's a couple of songs, some partially successful, that use "he" pronouns, but the most resonant ones stay as "you."

That's all undertone - by record-company fiat, it doesn't come out in any of the songs. But if you know it, it makes the good songs even better, the pain even clearer.

So this is a song, metafictionally, about a lost love, who LP can't even name - can't even talk about clearly. And I think that comes through in the singing, in the song itself - that emotion gets channeled into the performance. And it's a great song.

I don't wish LP had to keep making music that was wrong for her. But I wish, maybe, that she had wanted to explore more in this area, that she'd grabbed more control then - maybe that one of these songs broke out, was enough of a hit to let her do this style of music her way then. It didn't happen - most of the things I wish for never happen. But we do have a cluster of great songs out of it: I'll take that.