Hits Different
Mash-ups & Live Pairings
- Hits Different / Death by a Thousand Cuts (Eras Tour, London)
- Hits Different / Welcome to New York (Eras Tour, New Orleans)
“I heard your key turn in the door down the hallway”
His key turning in the lock is the sound of him being let in, a small domestic noise carrying all the weight of access and intimacy.
“Is that your key in the door? Is it okay? Is it you?”
She listens for his key in the door, half hoping, the sound of the lock standing in for whether he is coming back.
“Now the sun burns my heart and the sand hurts my feelings”
Sun as the agent of raw, exposed pain. The same sunlight that should warm instead burns the speaker's heart, the sun turned into one more ordinary thing that wounds in the rawness after a parting.
“I heard your key turn in the door down the hallway”
The speaker listens for a key turning at the far end of the corridor. Door and hallway arrive in one image and do different jobs: the key turning is a single moment, the corridor is the stretch of waiting before it. The hallway is what holds the suspense, because it is the distance the sound has to travel.
“I slur your name 'til someone puts me in a car”
Being put in the car by someone else as the passivity of heartbreak; she is handled, moved, not driving, the car a measure of how undone she is.
“I heard your key turn in the door down the hallway”
The door listened for rather than seen. The speaker tracks the absent partner by the remembered sound of a key turning in it, the threshold becoming the thing she strains to hear refill.
“A wrinkle in time like the crease by your eyes”
L'Engle's title names a fold in spacetime that lets travellers skip the distance between two points. The song cashes the phrase in as something physical and small: the wrinkle is a crease at the corner of someone's eyes, the mark left by years of smiling. A device for defeating time is reduced to the evidence of time passing on a face.
our song, still playing
“Each bar plays our song, nothing has ever felt so wrong”
“Our song” — Our Song
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.
the hallway
“I heard your key turn in the door down the hallway”
Angela carries Maroon's hallway into Hits Different, where the speaker hears a key turn in the door down the hallway, the corridor holding in both the sound of someone arriving or leaving a shared home.
American author (1918-2007), best known for A Wrinkle in Time, the 1962 children's novel in which a tesseract folds spacetime so travellers can cross it without covering the distance.