Dory Previn – ‘The Lady With The Braid’ from Mythical Kings And Iguanas

As far as I’m concerned this is arguably the greatest lyric ever written. I understand that’s a bold claim. What about Bob? And Leonard? Well, this one allows you to feel like you’ve just stepped inside someone’s head. No poetic swordsmanship, no symbolist deviation, just pure and absolute intimacy. In a way it reminds me of Thomas Bernhard. It’s almost sickening, this inner monologue, the sheer inanity of it, the banal desperation, sickening because it’s so horrifically close to home: what am I supposed to do with all of this empathy!? We wrote a response to this song for Fat Whites called ‘When I Leave’. For the lyric I tried to imagine the inner workings of her masculine counterpart, an oblique desperado of the Ed Dorn ‘Gunslinger’ variety, a caustic acid cowboy with a marauding imagination. One hundred young men at once, through his laughing eyes her whole world wheels and flutters; a shadow pickler, it’s all just pantomime to him, her body nothing more than a finely gilded boredom. In interviews I called it a ‘requiem for the patriarchy’. I’m not even really sure what I meant by that, it sounded kind of catchy and vaguely antagonistic. I was just keen on attaching myself to this masterpiece in some way.