Personality Disorder

Album: Autofiction (2022)
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Songfacts®:

  • Steal my blue sky personality disorder
    Fill me with your personality disorder
    Feel fine, steal my personality disorder


    A personality disorder is a mental health condition characterized by a pervasive and enduring pattern of thoughts, behaviors, and inner experiences that deviate significantly from the cultural expectations of the individual's society.

    Here, rather than singing about a personality order, per se, Brett Anderson uses the phrase in an abstract, expressionistic way. "If I was asked directly what this song is really about I would struggle to answer, but I make no apology for that," he told DIY magazine. "Sometimes songs take years to reveal themselves, even to the writer. Clearly I'm playing around with vulnerability, complexes, cracks in the psyche, but lots of it is painted in broad brushstrokes, the imagery and the sounds taking precedence over the narrative."
  • Anderson delivers the lyrics in a spoken-word style, inspired by The Fall singer Mark E Smith, who he considers the master of that style of singing. "I wanted to do it in my own way, not as an homage to Mark E Smith," he told he explained to Super Deluxe Edition. "I wanted to try to make it my own. That's what you have to do: take influences from other music and make your own crappy version of it. Because it's your own crappy version, it has much more worth than an efficient copy."

    "I've never seen the point of artists who can sing exactly like George Michael or who have 'the perfect voice,' because the point of music is personality," Anderson continued. "The point is to inject some of yourself into it, not ape someone else."
  • Anderson wrote "Personality Order" with Suede guitarist Richard Oakes and keyboardist Neil Codling with Ed Buller (Pulp, White Lies) manning the production desk. They recorded it for their ninth studio album, Autofiction. "This was one of the hardest tracks on the album for the band to get right, with its simplicity and spoken word verses proving trickier to master than something more complicated," Anderson told Uncut magazine. "That was quite a strange one. We thought, 'Oh, this is going to be really solid,' but there's something about it that means you have to focus on it more, because it's got the talking in the verse, so that timing is sort of odd."

    "We basically wanted to put down a drum beat that thumps," Oakes added, "and then a baseline that thumps, and then it was basically three and a half minutes of thumping. That's what we wanted out of the song, and Brett knew exactly what to do with the vocal."

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