I'll Tell A Lie, But It's Understood
and it's worth understanding
The Song
Title: I Guess
Artist: Lizzy McAlpine
Album: Older
Year: 2024
The Story
Last spring, I attended the Detroit date of Lizzy McAlpine’s “End of the Movie” tour, only a few weeks before she postponed the remaining tour dates to recover her mental and physical health. Much of the setlist in Detroit was pulled from five seconds flat, McAlpine’s instant classic from 2022, offset by a smattering of older tracks and a couple of new ones. One of those new ones was particularly memorable:1 Before the song began, McAlpine taught the crowd a wordless four-bar melody and told us that she’d queue us when it was time to go.2 When it was time, we hit the outro hard. It was incredible.
That song, I’m sure you’ve guessed, was “I Guess,” from McAlpine’s most recent album, Older.3 As a musical expression of pure catharsis, it’s hard to do better than the backend of “I Guess,” which kicks into gear with those group vocals but is also further elevated by a few flourishes, like the rising whirr of a synth4 and the delightful counterpoint exchange of a pair of trumpets, before winding down to an appropriately personal exit. It’s a tremendous bit of songwriting, but more than that it’s a tremendous bit of arrangement. This is one of McAlpine’s superpowers.5
Because here’s the neat reveal: Compositionally, “I Guess” is really only two chord progressions—the verse and the chorus—each of them rather simple. But McAlpine wrings every last bit of juice out of each of those passages, twisting and adjusting and reframing them so that, even as the underlying structure repeats, the song propels you forward with its rising tension.6
By the time those group vocals erupt, it feels like an entirely different song than those sparse opening bars of McAlpine’s solo voice and gently strummed guitar, even though those two sections, so distinct and separate in their experience, are built on the same foundation. McAlpine utilizes a different melody for the outro than the verse, but she’s been hinting at that melody in the background throughout the song, so none of the key components of the outro are entirely new. That all this is true even as the verse and outro feel so utterly distanced from one another is exactly the strength of McAlpine’s arrangement. She’s taken us on a sonic journey, but we never even left home.
I give “I Guess” four out of five stars.
Also memorable: The opener that particular night was Olivia Barton, who provides vocals on Corook’s catchy and kind “If I Were a Fish,” an obscure song that had just gone mega-viral on TikTok days before the show. Barton seemed bewildered by her virality. McAlpine expressed the same sentiment when playing “Ceilings,” the song of hers that had gone bizarrely viral on TikTok a few months prior. I don’t use TikTok but it seems like a weird place that does weird things to people.
My all-time favorite use of this tactic belongs to Ben Folds. During performances of “Army,” he divides the audience in half and teaches each half a different horn part from the song’s climax. Then the moment comes and Folds is doing his showman thing and the crowd is buzzing in counterpoint melody and I’m directly reminded of the communal power of music.
While Detroit didn’t make the grade, it seems like our old hockey rivals did, as it’s reportedly the Toronto crowd of that same tour providing the group vocals for the final cut.
I’m talking about the ascending tone at the 2:45 mark. Is that a synth? I’m not sure but the live videos of the song exclude that particular flourish and I got tired of trying to research this. In the Olden Days, I would’ve just checked the liner notes to see what additional instruments and performers appeared on the track but it’s 2024 and everything is streaming and there are no liner notes and now I’m sad about something that roughly 12 people on earth care about.
I’d cite “called you again,” from five seconds flat, as another shining example of this ability.
In a composition class, a professor once told us that the folly of young composers was an inability to focus on one idea, that we got distracted by novelty rather than refining one idea to its best possible form. At the time, obsessed as I was with bands like Gatsbys American Dream and The Receiving End of Sirens, who were experimenting with through-composed structures, this annoyed the absolute shit out of me. Of course, I’m sure the professor knew nothing of those bands and was instead thinking of what McAlpine’s done here. During her studies at Berklee, I wonder if anyone told McAlpine something similar, and if she had a better response than I did.