Sweet Nothing

“Outside, they're push and shoving, you're in the kitchen, humming”

The kitchen as the shelter inside which the partner is humming while the world outside the door is being violent. The line names a sharp interior/exterior split: the chaos of the public-facing life held at the threshold, the kitchen holding the partner's small ordinary domestic sound. The image is one of the catalogue's most precise renderings of the kitchen-as-shielded-interior: not the room of dance, not the room of collapse, but the room where unremarkable existence (humming, being in the kitchen) is itself the act of love the song is naming sweet nothing.

“On the way home I wrote a poem”

A poem written on the walk home and handed over as it is, with no occasion attached. The reply, "What a mind", receives the writing rather than asking anything of it, and the speaker notes that this happens all the time. Everyone else in the song wants something from her, so the ordinariness is the point.