Our Song
Mash-ups & Live Pairings
- Our Song / Jump Then Fall (Eras Tour, Madrid)
- Our Song / Call It What You Want (Eras Tour, New Orleans)
Hidden message
Live n love
Encoded in the album’s liner notes.
“Our song is the slamming screen door”
The door as the homecoming sound of a teenage romance. The screen door's slam punctuates the nightly ritual of sneaking back in, locating young love in the small percussive details of a rural house.
“I was ridin' shotgun with my hair undone In the front seat of his car”
Riding shotgun with her hair undone in the front seat as the unselfconscious freedom of teenage love; the car is simply where the romance lives, the undone hair the sign of being entirely at ease in it.
“Sneakin' out late, tappin' on your window”
Tapping on the window is courtship conducted around the house rather than through it. The pane is what makes the approach secret, and the secrecy is most of the charm.
“'fore I said, "Amen," asking God if he could play it again”
An everyday wish is shaped as a real prayer, saying Amen and asking God to let the moment repeat.
“Got to the hallway, well on my way to my lovin' bed”
A late-night passage through the house, the speaker tracing the corridor home on her way to bed. This is one of the earliest hallways in the catalogue and it sets the pattern: the corridor is somewhere to be travelled through rather than a threshold to be crossed, and the song measures the walk rather than the arrival.
“I grabbed a pen and an old napkin and I wrote down our song”
The final verse resolves the problem the first verse set up. The couple had no song, the speaker kept naming ordinary sounds instead, and then she writes one, and what she writes is the thing playing. The song stops describing a song and becomes the one it was describing. It is an unusually complete example for a debut album, and the same move returns in more pointed forms much later.
Writing the song is the resolution the narrative has been withholding, so the device carries the plot rather than decorating it. Authorship is presented as something a teenager can simply decide to do.
“Our song is the slamming screen door”
The chorus keeps defining the title phrase as things that are not music: a screen door, a laugh on the phone, a whispered prayer. Each definition is a small refusal, because the couple have no song, as the first verse admits, so the speaker substitutes the sounds of their life for one. Saying the track's title inside the track is the smaller half of what happens here. The larger half is that the definition stays wrong until the last verse.
Substituting ordinary sound for music keeps the relationship both ordinary and precious, which is the song's whole register. The absence being described is what the track eventually fills.
our song, still playing
“Our song”
“Each bar plays our song, nothing has ever felt so wrong” — Hits Different
Hits Different slips in the phrase that titles her early single Our Song. The words are everyday, but coming from an artist whose first hit carried that name, the echo reads as a knowing look back.