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.
“Then threw up on the street”
Threw up on the street as the public-collapse register. The line places the speaker's physical breakdown in the most exposed possible coordinate; the street here is the space of unmediated witness, with no kind interior between her and the world.
“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.
“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.
a mistaken sighting and a bus that never comes
“Like waiting for a bus that never shows You just start walkin' on”
“I thought I saw you at the bus stop, I didn't though” — the 1
Both songs reach for a bus when picturing an absence, but the two speakers do different things with it. In the 1 the bus stop is where a sighting turns out to be mistaken: the speaker thought they saw the person and did not. Hits Different uses waiting for a bus that never shows as a simile for disappointed expectation. One is a mistaken recognition and the other is a comparison to waiting, and neither speaker does what the other does.
the hero who should not have died
“This is why they shouldn't kill off the main guy”
“You knew the hero died so what's the movie for?” — hoax
The hero's death reads as a storytelling choice the speaker resents in both songs: in hoax, a question about why the story carries on once its hero is gone; in Hits Different, a complaint about how the story should have been told in the first place.
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.