“Who told you you have to be good?” Long Neck frontwoman Lily Mastrodimos sings on album closer and Soft Animal title track, paraphrasing Mary Oliver’s 1986 poem Wild Geese. The record is nearing its end, and at this point, we get the sense that Mastrodimos has grown tired of being good. Or rather, she’s grown tired of having goodness dragged out of her by thankless, unforgiving circumstances, much like how she drags out the words “polite and gracious”-- to borrow from the late Ms. Oliver –“a hundred miles in the desert.”
Mastrodimos’s stripped-down 4th LP, composed mostly in Covid-induced solitude, marks a sonic return to her solo era before Long Neck’s sound had been filled out by a backing band. Even with occasional contributions from her collaborators, the absence of company is felt throughout Soft Animal. It’s an album that often sounds lonely, recalling long solo walks during the early days of quarantine, tentatively breathing in the air of the outside world while still feeling disconnected from everyone in it. This sonic emptiness is fitting thematically, as much of Soft Animal’s lyrical content deals with the struggles of isolation. It’s a reflection of the self-questioning spirals we go down when we’re left alone in our own heads for too long, as well as the difficulties of re-adjusting to social and professional life that follow those periods of reclusiveness.
She begins the album by comparing herself to the minute-long opening track’s titular “Evergreen”-- strong, dependable, always in bloom, not because she necessarily wants to be, but because she feels like she has to be. The spacey, ominous production mimics the fogginess of someone who has overextended herself to her breaking point. The distorted background vocals and sample of a barely-discernible conversation between a mother and toddler give the track a disorienting feeling, not unlike sleep paralysis. Like much of the rest of the album, it feels transient and unsure, existing in an in-between space.
Soft Animal’s ability to toe the line between the universal and the deeply personal is perhaps its greatest strength. Almost as soon as lockdown began, we were bombarded with co-opted “we’re all in this together” messages from celebrities and politicians whose lived experiences of pandemic life were worlds away from the average person’s (as well as empty promises and inaction from those in power). This Long Neck album recognizes that the grief is simultaneously all of ours (collectively) and each of ours (alone). Take the delicately fingerpicked “Cut & Burn” for example, in which Mastrodimos likens her isolation to “a cat run out to die,” sighing, “this is private, this is mine.” She presents this cycle of ups and downs– mostly downs –as a forest burning to the ground, growing back from the ash and decay, and burning down again.
That’s the crux of Mastrodimos’ songwriting on Soft Animal– failing and starting over a million times, all while struggling to show herself the same kindness that she’s committed to showing others, whether or not it's returned. On piano ballad “The Headwaters,” she fruitlessly attempts to preserve an unequal relationship and in the process, sacrifices her own wellbeing for someone who doesn’t reciprocate her efforts. “What can I do to mean something to you?” she pleads, so clouded by her good intentions that she forgets to mean something to herself.
Interpersonal relationships aren’t the only area of our narrator’s life in which she puts herself under immense pressure during extenuating circumstances. “If I can’t put a pen to paper, what good am I? / The calendar says April, but it’s May, June, and July,” she muses on “Ants,” having internalized the message that her self-worth must be directly correlated with her creative outlet, even in an ongoing global crisis. Especially during an ongoing global crisis. For artists and writers, the fear of emerging from quarantine having not finished our King Lear became an existential one. Who are we outside of our art? The harsh truth is that adversity doesn’t always equal creative motivation, and sometimes the things that make our lives harder don’t inspire our greatest work. There’s this idea that if we’re able to spin our suffering into great art, that suffering will somehow become meaningful and “worth it.” “Ants” grapples with this notion and occasionally falls for it, finally settling (sort of) on the resigned, open-ended line, “I guess that everybody is.”
“558” is the cut that holds the most personal resonance for me, and if you spent any part of the last two years working in the service industry, I’m guessing you’ll feel similarly. It's a jarring departure from the bare-bones acoustic folk of the rest of the album, with its fuzzy electric guitars and discordant low-fi production mimicking the alienation of a tedious, mind-numbing job. It reminds me of the protective detachment I had to develop last year while working as a waitress, shutting my brain off for hours at a time and turning myself into a customer service robot. I pushed all the grief and fear down as customers pointed at my mask and said, “you know you don’t have to wear that anymore, right?” and on a couple occasions, told me I’d look prettier without it; as the two drunk girls at the end of the packed bar on a Monday night toasted “to Covid being over!” during August of last year; as an immunocompromised coworker got infected just weeks later, and our manager neglected to tell the rest of the staff that we’d been exposed. The first time I heard Mastrodimos snarl, “thank you for coming into work / wasn’t my choice to make,” I felt that same anger bubbling back up. Listening to “558” felt like stealing a few minutes in the walk-in fridge to cool down and indulge in my resentment toward rude customers and bosses who prioritize profit over safety before returning to dissociative, dehumanizing work with a smile on my (masked) face.
Other tracks on the album’s back half like “Gardener” and “Visitor” deal with recovery and rebuilding over quiet, sparse instrumentation that gradually grows into something grander, swelling at each song’s emotional peak. The former takes a more introspective approach, while the latter is more socially-inclined, depicting a reunion scene between acquaintances who haven’t seen each other in a long time and might not see each other for a while afterward. We see Mastrodimos momentarily healed by much-needed human connection, tenderly singing, “there’s no one on earth I wanna know more than you.” She caps off this campfire sing-along country ballad with a bittersweet farewell– “not goodbye but see you soon.”
“Soft Animal” closes out the album of the same name, serving as the thesis statement that Mastrodimos has been slowly building up to. Her dissection of the album’s central questions– “Who do you love? / How do you love them? / What do you want? / How do you show it?” --feels reminiscent of Mitski’s subversive 2014 ballad “I Will,” which Mitski has said is not a love song for someone else, but a series of reassurances that she herself would want a lover to say to her. In a similar vein, “Soft Animal” sees Mastrodimos finally putting herself first for once after a record’s worth of self-neglect. In learning to extend her forgiving nature and generosity to her own needs, she ends up letting go of some resentment towards both herself and others. Mastrodimos’ strength does not come from rejecting her vulnerability and gentleness but rather from directing it inwards and using it to care for herself the way she’s used to caring for those around her. By the time the key change hits and the band begins to play us out, she’s ready to fly with the wild geese into the harsh and exciting unknown.
