Crucial Track for January 18, 2026

"Value Inn" by Laura Stevenson

#365songs (18 / 365)

My first Laura Stevenson album was Wheel, after reading a rave review or two on the community music review site Sputnikmusic. It made me a fan for life, helped immensely by her continuing to release songs like "Value Inn," on her fifth album The Big Freeze.

It's a tragedy that Laura Stevenson isn't playing to crowds of thousands like, say, Phoebe Bridgers, and I like Phoebe Bridgers a lot. I mean, it whips ass for me, because I've gotten to see Stevenson twice at the Vera Project, my favorite venue in Seattle, in an audience of, like, 80 people. I guess her music tends to be a little more opaque and a little less pithily quotable than Bridgers but that doesn't feel like it explains the vast chasm between their popularity levels. But anyway.

"Value Inn" is about struggling with self-harm in a hotel room, I gather, and it's a study in tension. The insistent repetition of the simple chorus "I am so nice" becomes a kind of ominous self-harm of its own: "a point of pride," sure, but also maybe part of what led the singer to where she is. (Based on interviews it's reasonable to assume "Value Inn" is autobiographical, but I think there's always a little narrative distance between the real singer and the "character" in their songs, just as there's always a little of the singer in even a song explicitly about an invented character.) The singing is calm and dispassionate but the distorted guitar swells and roils behind it — especially at that conflicted "I am so nice" chorus — then recedes. "The waves crash down," indeed.