Valentine

Album: The Idler Wheel... (2012)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song finds Apple taking on two voices to convey her feelings about the fallout from a broken relationship. While the first one is brusque and dangerous to herself, the second is more innocent and childlike. "I stand no chance of growing up," she sings as we hear her tearfully try to cope with a dinner date with her ex.
  • Apple sings first with a self-destructive voice:

    While you were watching someone else
    I stared at you and cut myself


    Speaking with Interview Magazine, she expressed her concerns about that lyric: "I was a little afraid of putting that line in because I didn't want to make it sound cool," Apple said, "because I don't cut myself… I used to be somebody that would cut themselves, and it is about wanting to feel something. But something that I do... I mean, this is totally from an actual situation of me watching someone watching someone else being really alive - not quite in the way it seems in the song - but after a while I realize that I've dug holes in my palm with my fingernails. I just tend to do things to myself that I don't realize I'm doing. Sometimes I bite my lip so that it splits and hurts, and yet I can't stop. And sometimes I'd play shows on the last run, I'd scratch my neck while I was singing, and I'd horrified to see these red streaks of blood after. I'd go back after meet-and-greets, and I would look in the mirror and be horrified because there would be, like, just streaks, like I'd gone like this." [Mimes scratching her neck.]

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