Packing a Punch: Anger, Sadness, and Love in “I Told You Things”
Navigating all of the feelings at once.
In honor of me going to see Gracie Abrams tomorrow night, I decided to unpack one of her songs this week. A deluxe track on The Secret of Us, “I Told You Things” is a reflective song about heartbreak and the lasting negative impact someone can have on the human psyche. Its form is non-traditional for contemporary pop music. It consists of two short verses, a bridge, and a third verse that restates part of the first. The extensive bridge packs the biggest emotional punch of the song and builds it from simpler production to an outpouring of musical feeling.
Self-Reference
The first verse kicks off with the song title: “I told you things that I never said / You’re the golden boy and my worst regret / So I cut the cost and I limit feeling.” The opening line indicates that the speaker treated the muse as someone special, worthy of her trust and secrets. The fact that she “never said” these “things” also implies communication without speech, indicating an unspoken connection and understanding between them. Despite being generally regarded positively as the “golden boy,” the muse is also the speaker’s “worst regret.” With this in mind, the term “golden boy” is reframed with a sense of sarcasm and resentment as well as reflective sadness. Her resolve to “cut the cost” by attempting to “limit feeling” is ironic, as her feelings proceed to spill out in this song. She aspires to emotionally distance herself from the “cost” of the relationship—her feelings being hurt and disrespected.
Abrams includes references to other songs from her discography: “You were all at once ‘til the fade to black / Took your cigarettes and poems back / You were in my hands, now you’re on my ceiling.” The notion of being “all at once” points to a whirlwind love of intense emotions, similar to “The blue”: “You came out of the blue like that.” The “fade to black,” on the other hand, uses a film metaphor to describe the end of the relationship with a sense of abrupt but cinematic closure that echoes “Normal Thing”: “It’s a normal thing to fall in love with movie stars.” The muse’s “cigarettes and poems” are symbols of allure and charm that recur in the album, particularly in “Blowing Smoke.” As one physical and one abstract thing, these further represent the muse being physically and emotionally distant. The shift from the speaker’s “hands” to “ceiling” similarly indicates a loss of control as she finds herself dreaming about or imagining the muse while laying in bed. This line is echoed in the previous track, “That’s So True”: “catch me on your ceiling.”
Fame
The song proceeds straight into the second verse: “But how’s the city been? You get recognized / At the local bar by the drunken guys / And the starlet girls, they claw for pieces.” After establishing the emotional significance of the muse, the speaker attempts smalltalk as she wonders about him now. The “drunken guys” and “starlet girls”—both somewhat pejorative terms for desperate people—recognize him, confirming his celebrity status. The image of “claw[ing] for pieces” of the muse is vicious and animalistic, dismissing these girls as subhuman fame seekers.
The speaker then taunts him with questions: “Do you give a few? Do you like that? / Do you freak out or get sad? / Do you go home, or am I reaching?” She asks if he gives in to these people and grants them “a few” pieces of himself, fame, or his lifestyle, and whether it inflates his ego to receive their attention and feel wanted or needed in this manner. She continues to imagine alternative hypotheticals and reactions that the muse might have, from panic to sadness, in response to the pressures of fame. Realizing that she can no longer predict what he would do, she resorts to these questions.
Resisting Temptation
The bridge continues the conversational tone, beginning a long chain of connected phrases and ideas: “Hey, wait, guess what? Yesterday / I stopped and played it safe / Instead of walking straight / To you to say / Stay, never mind, okay.” The speaker resists the urge to ask the muse to come back, realizing that this is the “safe” option. Throughout the bridge, and starting with the first word, Abrams employs assonance of the “ay” sound abundantly. In addition to the music amping up and Abrams jumping the octave halfway through, this helps build the song to its climax at the end of the bridge. The enjambment from “say” to “[s]tay” also propels it forward.
The speaker expresses regret about how she used to view the muse: “Don’t mean it, plus you’ve changed / Not much, but just enough / To throw away / Fake fantasies and games.” Her emotions have tempted her towards self-destructive behavior, but she knows rationally what is best for her. The muse’s subtle changes were “just enough” for her to realize that it had to be over. “Fake fantasies and games” represent her hope for a positive future together, but now she is dismissing these as delusional. She is also faced with a muddled sense of time: “I’ve lost a year, it’s strange / Composed a hundred ways / To tell you, hey.” Her time with the muse feels “lost” or wasted now that it is over. In her sadness, she has been overthinking and looking for ways to communicate her feelings to him. The word “[c]omposed” is a clever choice here, as it literally means to compose a message, but Abrams’ songs are also musical compositions through which she communicates ideas and feelings.
Trapped
The rhyme scheme diverts from the pattern for the next few lines: “What if I took your call / As more than just a call? / As writing on the walls.” The speaker understood this “call” as a warning of the heartbreak to come. This deliberate departure from the “ay” sounds disrupts the lyrical flow in a manner that demands attention but also further reinforces the next line when it comes back: “You built this cage.” This powerful statement reveals that she feels trapped in her own thought spirals by what the muse has done to her. Every four lines of the bridge, the melody follows this pattern where it slows down, and here the one-syllable words are emphasized by these clear, even note divisions. The bridge ends with an intense image of the speaker sick or near death: “Lost color in my face / You’re fair and I’m insane / Hallucination, shame / Guilt, pain, more pain.” She makes a sarcastic remark about the muse being “fair” while she is deemed “insane,” presumably by his standards. The final lyrics are all things that she is experiencing, summarized simply by “pain.” “Hallucination” points back to “you’re on my ceiling,” whereas “shame” and “[g]uilt” arise despite her being framed as a victim in the situation.
The song ends with another verse that contains echoes of the first: “I told you things that I never said / To anybody else, I regret them / But I’ll pack it up and practice leaving.” The altered repetition clarifies that the speaker means “things” that she told exclusively to the muse, and sharing those parts of herself is her specific “regret.” Her decision to “pack it up and practice leaving” reveals that she feels the need to improve at leaving behind her feelings when a relationship ends. This line also anticipates the final track on the deluxe album, “Packing It Up,” which takes a turn toward the positive. Unlike her, the muse doesn’t need this practice: “You were all at once ‘til the fade to black / ‘Til the yellow glow, turned a little sad / You were in my hands, but you’re good at leaving.” The image warps into one of sadness, from a warm “yellow glow” to “black,” the absence of color and light.
The muse is “good at leaving,” able to get over her faster than she can let go. This emotional imbalance results in the speaker left behind in the “cage” of pain and regret. The music also ends abruptly after this line without a harmonic resolution, creating an unfinished quality. There is also one musical motif that runs in the background throughout the entire song, suggesting that despite the journey that the speaker has recounted, nothing has changed at the core of her situation.
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