Frankie Cosmos: "Young"

Like all Frankie Cosmos songs, “Young” is over before you’ve noticed ittwo minutes and two seconds, just a handful of lines. Like all her best songs, it packs a small universe of observations into music that could fit on a grass blade. In its breeze and brevity, “Young” is a clear-eyed dissection on three nebulous states of being: “young,” “fun,” and “alive.” Each line skips like a rock across the surface of a larger idea, gathering up an essential truth before leaping to the next.

She opens with a sharp, wry acknowledgement of the sorts of belittling praise she’s probably read about herself in the past year: “With this I’m scraping by/ At least it’s cute that I try/ I wrote some songs that I sung/ And have you heard I’m so young?” But she moves into confusion over the idea of “young” (“Thought I heard a mumble/ Something about ‘fun’”) and finally into something like a rumination on existence: “I just wanna be alive, that’s it.” At this, the rudimentary drum machine clap stops, leaving a moment of air. 

Listen closely to that moment of air: It is like a pair of parentheses, containing all the things the song doesn’t voice. A scrutiny of words, their uses and limits; a sense of the universe as an open and essentially inscrutable place, our lives as random but meaningful occurrences in empty spaces. It’s a lot to read into four seconds, but just as her stage name implies, Greta Kline’s world is rich enough to contain it all. You just have to slow down and listen.

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