Crucial Track for February 6, 2026

"Batter" by Lady Lamb

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#365songs (37 / 365)

Another entry, I guess, in the "The end! No moral." series, this one a weird meditation on mortality, I guess, sung from just on the other side of death, I guess. (The album it's on's titled After, which: yep.) Two verses of abstract/metaphorical musing about impermanence and dissolution, framed by two startlingly concrete, jarringly incongruous verses about a plane crash.

The stuff in the middle feels important more because it separates the first and last verses than because of any of its actual content, though it does have some striking lines and I like the herky-jerkiness of it. It's a weird combination of grandiose — "blood's your compass / let it wander," "now I return to my first purpose" — and frivolous, such that it's hard to really feel much about it.

But, maybe because of the loftiness of the rest of the song, the almost cinematic hard cut from the plane crash ("From the plane I called your name / but it didn't matter") to a quiet domestic scene of cake baking is really memorable. And it seems to infuse everything in that scene with meaning: it's not just a birthday cake, it's a symbol of how we're all progressing toward death at a rate of one year per year. The batter: raw material, waiting to be made into something. A kind of resurrection? And having started down that line of thinking, do I even need to talk about the fact that the batter has just had an egg cracked into it?