Portions for Foxes: Ingrid Michaelson

"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've posted about this song before. I had a moment of wondering "am I allowed to do that?" but then remembered: it's my blog; there are no rules.

(I also posted, some years back, about another song by the same singer, Time Machine. That's less relevant, but, hey, I like to link.)

This week's song is The Chain by Ingrid Michaelson. As is pretty usual for me, it's another song about heartbreak, betrayal, and love gone wrong.

There's been a breakup, a bad one, and the singer is talking to the one who's gone away:

So glide away on soapy heels
And promise not to promise anymore
And if you come around again
Then I will take the chain from off the door

I always catch on that "promise not to promise anymore." Does it mean "don't lie to me again"? Does it mean "next time, it has to just be casual"? Does it mean "I'll take you back as long as you don't say anything stupid and ruin it"? Or all of those and more, all mixed together?

I'll never say that I'll never love,
Oh, but I don't say a lot of things,
And you my love are gone

I think of this song as more definitively "this is over" in my head than the song actually says. The title is explicitly referencing "if you come back, I'll let you." It's not quite a "please come back" song, but it's close.

What I love the most about this song I can't quote - towards the end, Michaelson does that refrain as a round, multi-tracking her voice, and going round and round it again and again, overlapping, as the music swells behind them - behind the "them" that is all her, all the individual voices that are all one person - and then it crashes and and it's just her voices, dropping out one by one as they hit the end of the refrain until it's just that one single voice ending it.

It's one of those perfect musical moments that comes around every so often, doing that paradigmatic thing - the soft LOUD soft transition that works so well in music when done right - and Michaelson just kills it. It is glorious and almost makes me ignore just how ambivalent the song is overall.