Folk-pop singer-songwriter Lizzy McAlpine returned yesterday with “Older,” the title track from her forthcoming third studio album. The achingly pretty piano ballad about the rough transition into adulthood debuted inside the Top 20 of the Genius Top Songs chart, where it’s still holding steady.
McAlpine wrote the song with Taylor Mackall and the track’s producer, Mason Stoops. Sonically, it’s just piano and voice, and that leaves plenty of space for McAlpine to ruminate on the sadness and confusion of her early 20s. (She’s 24.) In the first verse, she compares her life to an amusement park ride she can’t get off.
Over and over, a carousel ride
Pay for your ticket, watch the red moon climb
Sick to my stomach, can’t find the ground
Stuck in a loop, watch the curtain come down
In the chorus, she addresses some unspecified “you.” It could be another person or a part of herself she’d hoped to jettison by now.
Thought it’d be over by now
Thought you would leave
Thought I would come to my senses
Wish I was stronger somehow
What’s clear is that she’s spinning around and around with no final destination in sight.
Wish it was easy
Somewhere I lost all my senses
I wish I knew what the end is
Things get really heart-wrenching in the second verse, as McAlpine thinks about her aging mother and the childhood she can never reclaim. (Lizzy’s father died on March 13, 2020—she sings about him on “Headstones and Land Mines” and “chemtrails,” the 13th songs on her first two albums, respectively.)
Over and over, watch it all pass
Mom’s getting older, I’m wanting it back
Where no one is dying, and no one is hurt
And I have been good to you instead of making it worse
The song never offers a resolution because, well, there isn’t one. You’ve got to keep figuring out life as you go, though it seems McAlpine is off to a pretty decent start.
“To me, this album represents who I’ve become over the past three years,” McAlpine said in a press release, describing Older, which lands April 5. “Through the long and mostly tumultuous journey of making it, I have learned who I am as a person, who I want to be as an artist and what kind of art I want to make. This album is a culmination of that growth, showcasing the rawest and most honest version of me.”
You can read all the lyrics to “Older” on Genius now.
