I Hate It Here
Mash-ups & Live Pairings
- I Hate It Here / the lakes (Eras Tour, Cardiff)
“Nostalgia is a mind's trick / If I'd been there, I'd hate it / It was freezing in the palace”
The song turns nostalgia into something to distrust rather than indulge. Memory here is a trick of the mind that gilds a past the speaker would in fact have hated: the palace that looks so inviting in recollection was freezing to actually live in. Read this way, the song clarifies a thread that runs through the whole record, the speaker catching herself romanticising what is gone and refusing its comfort. She keeps the longing but relocates it, saving her romanticism for an inner life rather than projecting it back onto a past she has edited down to only its warm parts.
Anxiety as chronic escapism, the mind in constant retreat from an unbearable present into fantasy and private internal worlds. The speaker cannot inhabit the moment; the internal landscape is the only tolerable place. A portrait of dissociation as a coping strategy.
“people need a key to get to, the only one is mine”
The secret gardens of her imagination are locked, and she holds the only key, the private inner world kept for herself.
“I hate it here so I will go to secret gardens in my mind”
The image of retreating to a "secret garden" reaches back to Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1911 novel, in which a neglected walled garden becomes the private, restorative world its lonely children bring back to life. In the song the secret garden is the same kind of enclosed inner refuge, a place the speaker escapes into when the outer world is unbearable, which is why a community reader hears Burnett's book behind the line.
the refuge of the mind
“I'll go to secret gardens in my mind”
“Take me to the Lakes, where all the poets went to die” — the lakes
Widely heard as a sister song to the lakes: both make a refuge of an imagined elsewhere entered in the mind. Where the lakes asks to be taken to the poets' landscape, I Hate It Here retreats to secret gardens of the imagination, the same flight from an unbearable present into a private interior world. The hosts took up the pairing in the episode.
the key to the inner world
“People need a key to get to The only one is mine”
“'Tis locked inside my memory And only you possess the key” — The Fate of Ophelia
I Hate It Here keeps a secret garden of the mind that needs a key, and the only key belongs to the speaker herself. The Fate of Ophelia hands that key to someone else, the memory locked away and only you holding the key to it, the private interior that was hers alone now opened to another.