Portions for Foxes: Shannon McArdle

"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 didn't plan this - it's another artifact of alphabetization, the same thing that's happened a couple of times before this year - but I'm coming from Ida Maria's 2008 poppy, happy sex song I Like You So Much Better When You're Naked last week to a sadder, quieter song about sex from Shannon McArdle, from the same year.

This week, it's the Summer of the Whore.

It's a break-up song - doubly so, since McArdle's marriage to a bandmate broke up at the same time as her former band The Mendoza Line did the previous year. At this remove, I don't know how those break-ups happened, and it doesn't much matter - call them simultaneous, call them inevitable, call them anything you want.

This song is the title track of an album all about those break-ups: a quiet, sad record of loss and need and emptiness, about suddenly finding a vast hole in the middle of your life and having to fill it up.

Summer of the Whore, the song, is about one way to fill that - the singer is telling it to someone, talking through how she feels, and how she plans to spend the next little while.

All this heat and this fever has me wanting so much more
This season is the summer of the whore

And explaining why she's doing this right now.

All these months since he left me has emptied me out to the core
To fill me up must declare it the summer of the whore

But this isn't her new normal. She's clear about what this is, and how long it will last, already looking towards when this will end and she'll be able to move on.

But this offer is over when I've settled up the score
If I were you I'd get in on the summer of the whore

The music is quiet, almost ominous, almost droning - no great leaps up or down, just staying on the same level for nearly four minutes. Giving that feeling of waiting, of a moment in time, of something paused that will change, entirely, inevitably, very soon.

I love the way this song drains "whore" of almost all its power, through that quietness, that droning, that repetition. It's not even the usual feminist "reclaiming" - McArdle doesn't really want to make it a positive. She just has a song about a mood, a moment, a season - what it feels like to be left behind and want to do some sowing of wild oats before she moves on in turn. It is what it is. This is where the singer is right now: the summer of the whore. Take it or leave it.