Pretty Things
FEiN Little Homes: naked waiting for body to take shape, friends photogenic and skinny: treadmill, pectoral muscles, dehydrate accentuate soft abdomen; cosmetic surgery satire on the little home of the body.
Listen: SpotifyApple Music
ISRC QZ2QB1600012 (soundexchange)
Track thirteen on Little Homes (May 31, 2016), after Lonely People. Walton/Woodward co-write. This is the LP’s other body song, BMI’s cosmetic-surgery thread played as comedy of perpetual self-improvement: the body as an unfinished project whose payoff is always a year away.
The narrator stands naked waiting for my sickly body to take shape, insisting don’t look, I’m still getting ready, oh my happiness just a year away. Around him the chorus pipes in the envy that drives it, all my friends are interesting, photogenic pretty things, all my friends are happy with their skinny little bodies, social comparison years before the feed made it constant. Verse two is the regimen itself, the gym as a sculpture studio: gotta hit the treadmill, gotta earn that body make it pop pop pop pop, then the clinical wishlist, peculiar pectoral muscles, dehydrate, accentuate, my soft abdomen. The song never reaches the year-away happiness. It just loops back to can’t make sense of it all.
Sculptor plays this haunting; Pretty Things plays it as the grind. Where Lonely People sold loneliness, here the self taxes its own flesh. Leads into Blanket.
Written by Luke Francis Walton and Brandon Michael Woodward (FEiN). Produced and recorded by FEiN at Tiny Giant; engineered at LMU; mixed and mastered by Frank Rosato at Woodcliff (Discogs). Brian Robert Jones, bass (album).
Lyrics
I stand naked waiting, For my sickly body to take shape. Don't look! I'm still getting ready, Oh my happiness just a year away. I spend all my waking hours, Grazing through the shadows — still no luck. I stand neck deep in the water, As it rises up, yeah it rises up, oh. All my friends are interesting, Photogenic pretty things, Can't help showing it off. And all my friends are happy, With their skinny little bodies, Can't make sense of it all. I sweat, Running, baby, running; plastic picke t fences line my sight. Tonight, (Gotta) gotta hit the treadmill, Gotta earn that body make it pop pop pop pop Particles, Peculiar Pectoral muscles. Dehydrate, Accentuate, My soft abdomen. All my friends are interesting, Photogenic pretty things, Can't help showing it off. And all my friends are happy, With their skinny little bodies, Can't make sense of it all.